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CONTENTS. 



Chronological Annals <• : xi-xx 

Genealogical Tables xxii-xx2fV 

CHAPTER I. 

THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 60T-1013. 

SEOTION 

I. — Britain and the English 39 

II.— The English Conquest, 449-607 44 

III— The Northumbrian Overlordship, 607-685 53 

IY._TheOverlordship of Mercia, 685-823 '70 

v.— Wessex and the Danes, 800-880 '^'^ 

YL— The West-Saxon Kingdom, 892-1013 84 

CHAPTER II. 

ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 1013-1204. 

I— The Danish Kings 93 

II.— The English Restoration, 1042-1066 97 

III- Normandy and the Normans, 912-1066 100 

IV.— The Conqueror, 1042-1066 103 

v.— The Norman Conquest, 1068-1071 HO 

VI.— The English Revival, 1071-1127 116^ 

VIL— England and Anjou, 870-1154 126' 

VHI.— Henry the Second, 1154-1189 131 

IX.— The Fall of the Angevins, 1189-1204 139 

CHAPTER in. 

THE GREAT CHARTER, 1204-1265. 

I,— English Literature under the Norman and Angevin Kings . . 143 

II.— John, 1204-1215 147 

HI— The Great Charter, 1215-1217 152 



viii CONTENTS. 



eiSOTlON TAGE 

IV. — The Universities 156 

v.— Henry the Third, 1217-1257 165 

VI.— The Friars 171 

VIL— The Barons' War, 1258-1265 175 

CHAPTER IV 

THE THKEE EDWARDS, 1265-1360. 

I— The Conquest of Wales, 1265-1284 183 

n.— The English Parliament, 1283-1295 190 

III.— The Conquest of Scotland, 1290-1305 201 

IV.— The English Town 213^ 

v.— The King and the Baronage, 1290-1327 220 

VI.— The Scotch War of Independence, 1306-1342 229 

CHAPTER V. 

THE HUNDRED -YEARS' WAR, 133G-1431. 

I— Edward the Third, 1336-1360 235 

II.— The Good Parliament, 1360-1377 247 

III.— John Wyclif 251 

IV.— The Peasant Revolt, 1377-1381 259 

v.— Richard the Second, 1381-1399 269 

VI.— The House of Lancaster, 1399-1422 278 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE NEW MONARCHY, 1422-1540. 

I— Joan of Arc, 1422-1451 285 

11— The Wars of the Roses, 1450-1471 294 

III— The New Monarchy, 1471-1509 301 

IV.— The New Learning, 1509-1520 315 

v.— Wolsey, 1515-1531 330 

VI— Thomas Cromwell, 1530-1540 340 



CHAPTER VIL 

THE REFORMATION. 

I— The Protestants, 1540-1553 355 

IL— The Martyrs, 1553-1558 367 

IIL— Elizabeth, 1558-1560 375 

IV.— England and Mary Stuart, 1560-1572 367 

/ 



CONTENTS. ix 



EKCTION PAGE 

v.— The England of Elizabeth 396 

VL— The Armada, 1572-1588 408 

VII.— The Elizabethan Poets 421 

VIII.— The Conquest of Ireland, 1588-1610 438 

CHAPTER VIII. 

PUKITAN ENGLAND. 

I.— The Puritans, 1583-1603 ,,.... 455 

IL—TheFirst of the Stuarts, 1604-1623 468 

III.— The King and the Parliament, 1623-1629 484 

IV. — New England 495 

v.— The Tyranny, 1629-1640 503 

VI.— The Long Parliament, 1640-1644 521 

VII.— The Civil War, July, 1642-August, 1646 633 

VIII. — The Army and the Parliament, 1646-1649 543 

IX.— The Commonwealth, 1649-1653 555 

X.— The Fall of Puritanism, 1653-1660 664 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE REVOLUTION. 

I. — England and the Revolution 586 

II.— The Restoration, 1660-1667 602 

III.— Charles the Second, 1667-1673 613 

IV.— Danby, 1673-1678 624 

v.— Shaftesbury, 1679-1682 633 

VI.— The Second Stuart Tyranny, 1682-1688 641 

VIL — William of Orange 651 

VIII.— The Grand Alliance, 1689-1694 662 

IX.— Marlborough, 1698-1712 676 

X.—Wali3ole, 1712-1742 692 

CHAPTER X. 

MODERN ENGLAND. 

I— William Pitt, 1742-1762 706 

IL — The Independence of America, 1761-1785 725 

III.— The Second Pitt, 1783-1789 748 

IV.— The War with France, 1793-1815 768 

Epilogue, 1815-1873 798 



LIST OF MAPS. 



1. Britain in the midst of the English Conquest .,,... Faces p. 4V 

2. England in the Ninth Century . . . ' " 77 

3. Empire of the Angevins " 131 

4. France at the Treaty of Bretigny , . , . " 235 

5. The American Colonies in 1640 " 495 

6. England in the Nineteenth Century " 803 



CHEONOLOGICAL ANNALS 



ENGLISH HISTORY. 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



449-1016. 



449 Englisli land in Britain. 

45'? Kent conquered by Euglish. 

477 Landing of South Saxons. 

495 Landing of West Saxons. 

520 British victory at Mount Badon. 

547 Ida founds Kingdom of Bemicia. 

552 West Saxons take Old Sarum. 

565 ^tliellberlit, King of Kent, died 61G. 

568 driven back by West Saxons. 

571 West Saxons march into Mid-Britain. 

577 conquer at Deorham. 

593 ^thelfrith creates Kingdom of North- 

umbria, died 617. 

597 West Saxons defeated at Fethaulea. 

Augustine converts Kent. 

603 Battle of Dsegsastan. 

607 Battle of Chester. 

61 7 Eadwine, King of Northumbria, died 033. 

626 overlord of Britain. 

62 7 becomes Christian. 

633 slain at Hatfield. 

635 Oswald, King of Northumbria, died 642. 
defeats Welsh at Heveufeld. 

636 Aldan settles at Soly Island, 
639 Conversion of Wessex. 
642 Oswald slain at Maserfeld. 

655 Oswi, King of Northumbria, died 670. 
Victory at Winwced. 

657 Wulfere King in Mercia. 

658 West Saxons conquer as far as the Parret. 
664 Council of Whitby. 

Ccedmon at Whitby. 

668 Theodore made Archbishop of Canterbury. 

670 Egfritli, King of Northumbria, died 6S5. 

676 Wulfere drives West Saxons over Thames. 

681 Wilfrid converts South Saxons. 

682 Centwine of Wessex conquers Mid-Somerset. 
685 Egfrith defeated and slain at Nechtansmere. 
688 ¥ni, King of West Saxons, died 726. 



705 
714 

716 
733 

752 
755 
756 
758 
773 
777 
784 
786 
787 
794 

800 

808 

813 

822 
823 



824 
825 
827 

828 
835 
836 
849 
851 
853 



860 



Northumbrian conquest of Strathclyde. 

Ini defeats Ceolred of Mercia at Wodnesbor- 
ough. 

JlStbelbald, King of Mercia, died 755. 

Mercian conquest of Wessex. 

Wessex recovers freedom in battle of Burford. 

Deaths of Bceda and Boniface. 

Eadberht of Northumbria takes Alcluyd. 

Ofia, King of Mercia, died 794. 

subdues Kentish men at Otford. 

defeats West Saxons at Beusington. 

places Brightric on throne of Wessex. 

creates Archbishopric at Lichfield. 

First landing of Danes in England. 

Cenwulfj King of Mercia, died 819. 

suppresses Archbishopric of Lichfield. 

Eegberlit becomes King in Wessex, died 
886. 

Charles the Great restores Eardwulf iu North- 
umbri 

Ecgberht subdues the West Welsh to the Ta- 
rn ar. 

Civil War in Mercia. 

Ecgberht defeats Mercians at Ellauduiie. 

Ecgberht overlord of England south of 
Thames. 

Eevolt of East Anglia against Mercia. 

Defeat of Mercians by East Anglians. 

Mercia and Northumbria submit to Ecgberht. 

Ecgberht, overlord of all English kingdoms. 

invades Wales. 

defeats Danes at Hengestesdun. 

JEtlielwtilf, King of Wessex, died 858. 

Alfred born. 

Danes defeated at Aclea. 

Alfred sent to Kome. 

^thehvulf goes to Rome. 

^tlielbald, King of Wessex, died S60. 

iEtlielberlit, King of Wessex, died 806. 



\ 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



866 JEtliclred, King of Wesses, died 871. 

867 Danes conquer Northumbria. 

868 Peace of Nottingham with Danes. 

870 Danes conquer and settle in East Anglia. 

871 Danes invade Wessex. 
jEUred, King of Wessex, died 901. 

874 Danes conquer Mercia. 

876 Danes settle in Nortlmmbria. 

877 -(Elfred defeats Danes at Exeter. 

878 Danes overrun Wesses. 
Alfred victor at Edington. 
Peace of Wedmore. 

883 Alfred sends envoys to Rome and India. 
886 takes and refortifies London. 

893 Danes reappear in Thames and Kent. 

894 Alfred drives Hastings from Wesses. 

895 Hastings invades Mercia. 

896 M\kQ& drives Danes from Essex. 

897 Hastings quits England. 
Alfred creates a fleet. 

901 Eadward tlie Elder, died 925. 
912 Northmen settle in Normandy. 

91 3) 

?■ .(EthelfliEd conquers Danish Mercia. 
918' 

921 Eadward subdues East Anglia and Essex. 

924 owned aa overlord by Northumbria, 

Scots, and Strathclyde. 



925 ^tlielstan, died 940. 

926 drives Welsh from Exeter. 

934 invades Scotland. 

937 Victory of Brunanburh. 

940 Eadmund, died 94T. 

943 Dunstan made Abbot of Glastonbury. 

945 Cumberland granted to Malcolm, King of 

Scots. 

947 Eadred, died 955. 

954 makes Northumbria an Earldom. 

955 Eadwig, died 95T. 

956 Banishment of Dunstan. 

957 Revolt of Mercia under Eadgar. 

958 Eadg-ar, died 975. 

961 Dunstan Archbishop of Canterbury. 

975 Ead^vard tlie Mavtyr, died 975. 

979 ^tUelred tlie Unready, died 1016. 

980 Mercia and Northumbria part from Wesses. 

987) 
, ^ ^ ^ f Fulc the Black, Count of Anion. 
1040^ 

994 Invasion of Swegen. 

1002 Massacre of Danes. 

1003 Swegen harries Wessex, 

1012 Murder of Archbishop MMe&b.. 

1013 All England submits to Swegen. 

1014 Flight of ^thelred to Normandy. 

1016 Eadinund Ironside, King, and dies. 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS 



1017-1204. 



1017 
1020 
1027 

1035 
1037 
1040 
1042 
1044 
1060 
1045 
1047 
1051 
1052 



Cnut, King, died 1035. 

Godwine made Earl of Wessex. 

Cnut goes to Rome. 

Birth of William of Normandy. 

Harold and Harthacnut divide England. 

Harold, King, died 1040. 

Hartliacnut, King, died 1042. 

Ead^vard tlie Confessor, died 1005. 

Geoffry Martel, Count of Anjon. 

Lanfrane at Bee. 

Victory of William at Val-6s-duues. 

Banishment of Godwine. 

William of Normandy visits England. 

Return and death of Godwine. 

Harold made Earl of West Saxons. 

William's victory at Mortemer. 

Harold's first campaign in Wales. 

\ Norman conquest of southern Italy. 



1053 

1054 

1055 

10541 

1060i 

1058 William's victory at the Dive. 

1060 Normans invade Sicily. 

1063 Harold conquers Wales. 

1066 Harold, King. 

conquers at Stamford Bridge. 

defeated at Senlac, or Hastings. 

IVilliaiu of Normandy, King, died 1087. 

I Norman conquest of England. 



1070 
1075 
1081 
1085 
1086 
1087 
1093 
1094 

1096 

1097 

1098 
1100 

1101 
1106 

1109) 

1129' 

1109 

1111 

1113 

1114 

1118 

1120 

1122 

1124 



Reorganization of the Church. 
Rising of Roger Fitz-Osbern. 
William invades Wales. 
Failure of Danish invasion. 
Completion of Domesday Book. 
ITilliam the Bed, died 1100. 
Anselm Archbishop, 

Revolt of Wales against the Norman March- 
ers. 
Revolt of Robert de Mowbray. 
Normandy left in pledge to William. 
William invades Wales. 
Anselm leaves England. 
War with France. 
Henry tlie First, died 1135. 
Henry's Charter. 

William of Normandy invades England. 
Settlement of question of investitures. 
English Conquest of Normandy. 

Fulc of Jerusalem, Count of Anjcu. 

War with France. 

War with Anjou. 

Peace of Gisors. 

Marriage of Matilda with Henry V. 

Revolt of Norman baronage. 

Wreck of White Ship. 

Henry's campaign in Wales. 

France and Anjou support W^illiam Clito. 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



1 127 Matilda married, to Geoffry of Anjoii. 

1128 Death of the Clito in Flauders. 

1134 Revolt of Wales. 

1135 Steplien of Blois, died 1154. 

1137 Normandy repulses the Angevius. 
Revolt of Earl Robert. 

1138 Battle of the Standard. 

1139 Seizure of the Bishops. 
1141 Battle of Lincoln. 

1147 Matilda withdraws to Normandy. 

1148 Henry of Anjon in England. 
Archbishop Theobald driven into exile. 

1151 Henry becomes Duke of Normandy. 

1 1 52 Henry marries Eleanor of Guienne. 

1153 Henry In England. Treaty of Wallingford. 

1154 Henry tlie Second, died 1189. 
1160 Expedition against Toulouse. 

The Great Scutage. 
1 1 62 Thomas made Archbishop of Canterbury. 
1 1 64 Constitutions of Clarendon. 

Flight of Archbishop Thomas. 
1166 Assize of Clarendon. 



1169 
1170 

1174 
1176 
1178 
1181 
1189 

1190) 

1194i 

1194) 

1196/ 

1195) 

1246/ 

1197 

1199 

1200 

1203 
1204 



Strongbow's invasion of Ireland. 
Death of Archbishop Thomas. 
Inquest of Sheriff's. 
Rebellion of Henry's sons. 
Assize of Northampton. 
Reorganization of Curia Regis. 
Assize of Arms. 
Revolt of Richard. 
Richard tlie First, died 1199. 
Richard's Crusade. 

War with Philip Augustus. 

Llewellyn Ap-Jorwerth in North Wales. 

Richard builds Chateau Gaillard. 
Jolin, dies 1216. 

recovers Anjou and Maine. 

Layamon writes the Drut. 
Murder of Arthur. 

French conquest of Anjou and Norman 
dy. 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



1204-1295. 



1205 Barons refuse to fight for recovery of Nor- 
mandy. 

1208 Innocent III. puts England under Inter- 
dict. 

1211 John reduces Llewellyn-ap-Jorwerth to sub- 

mission. 

1212 John divides Irish Pale into counties. 

1213 John becomes the Pope's vassal. 

1214 Battle of Bouvines. 
Birth of Roger Bacon. 

1215 The Great Charter. 

1216 Lewis of France called in by the Barons. 
Henry tlie Tliird, died 1273. 
Confirmation of the Charter. 

1217 Lewis returns to France. 
Hubert de Burgh, Justiciary. 
Cliarter again confirmed. 

1221 Friars land ill England. 

1223 Charter again confirmed at Oxford. 

1225 Irish confirmation of Charter. 

1228 Revolt of Faukes de Breaute. 
Stephen Langton's death. 

1229 Papal exactions. 

1230 Failure of Henry's campaign in Poiton. 

1231 Conspiracy against the Italian clergy. 

1232 Pall of Hubert de Burgh. 

1237 Charter again confirmed. 

1238 Earl Simon of Leicester marries Henry's 

sister. 

1241 Defeat of Henry at Taillebourg. 

1242 Barons refuse subsidies. 



1246> 

1283/ 

1248 

1253 
1259 
1261 
1264 

1265 

1267 

1268 

1270 

1274 
1277 

1279 
1282 
1284 
1285 
1290 



1291 

1293 
1294 
1295 



Llewellyn - ap - GryfiTyth, Prince in North 
Wales. 

Irish refusal of subsidies. 

Earl Simon in Gascony. 

Earl Simon returns to Englaud. 

Provisions of Oxford. 

Earl Simon leaves England. 

Mise of Amiens. 

Battle of Lewes. 

Commons summoned to Parliament. 

Battle of Evesham. 

Bogei' Bacon writes his '^Opus Majus." 

Llewellyn-ap-Gryff"yth owned as Prince of 
Wales. 

Edward goes on Crnsade. 

Ed-4vard the First, died 1301. 

Edward reduces Llewellyn - ap - Gryffyth to 
sxibmission. 

Statute of Mortmain. 

Conquest of Wales. 

Statute of Merchants. 

Statute of Winchester. 

Statute " Quia Emptores." 

Expulsion of the Jews. 

Marriage Treaty of Brigham. 

Parliament at Norham settles Scotch suc- 
cession. 

Edward claims appeals from Scotland. 

Seizure of Guienne by Philip of France. 

French fleet attacks Dover. 

Final organization of the English Parliament. 



XIV 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



THE WAR WITH SCOTLAND AND FRANCE. 



1396-1485. 



1296 
1297 



1298 



1301 

1302 

1304 
1305 
1306 
1307 



1308 
1310 

1312 
1314 
1316 
1318 
1322 

1323 
1324 
1325 
1326 
1327 

1328 

1329 
1330 
1332 
1333 

1334 
1335) 
1336J 
1336 

1337) 
1338> 
1339 

1340 
1343 
1346 
1347 



Edward conquers Scotlaud. 

Victory of Wallace at Stirling. 

Ontlawry of the Clergy. 

Barons refuse to serve in Flanders. 

Edward forced to renounce illegal taxation. 

Edward conquers Scots at Falkirk. 

Peace witli France. 

Barons demand nomination of Ministers by 
Parliament. 

Barons exact fresh confirmations of the 
Charters. 

Final submission of Scotland. 

Parliament of Perth. 

Rising of Robert Bruce. 

Parliament of Carlisle. First Statute of 
Provisors. 

Edtvard tiae Second, died 132T. 

Gavestou exiled. 

The Lords Ordainers draw up Articles of 
Kefonn. 

Death of Gaveston. 

Battle of Bannockburn. 

Battle of Athenry. 

Edward accepts the Ordinances. 

Death of Earl of Leicester. Ordinances an- 
nulled. 

Truce with the Scots. 

French attack Aquitaine. 

The Queen and Prince Edward in France. 

Queen lands in England. 

Deposition of Edward IT. 

Ed'ward tlie Tlilrd, died 1377. 

Treaty of Northampton recognizes inde- 
pendence of Scotland. 

Death of Robert Bruce. 

Death of Roger Mortimer. 

Edward Balliol invades Scotlaud. 

Battle of Halidon Hill. 

Balliol does homage to Edward. 

Balliol driven from Scotlaud. 

Edward invades Scotland. 

France again declares war. 

War with France and Scotland. 

Edward claims crown of France. 

Edward attacks France from Brabant. 

Battle of Sluys. 

War in Brittany and Guienne. 

Battles of Cressy and Neville's Cross. 

Capture of Calais. 

Truce with France. 

First appearance of the Black Death. 

Statutes of Laborers. 



1349 

1351) 

1353) 

1353 First Statute of Prsemunire, 



1354 
1356 

1360 

1367 

1368 

1370 
1372 
1374 
1376 
1377 



1378 
1380 
1381 



1382 

1384 
1387 

1389 
1394 
1396 

1397 
1398 
1399 

1400 
1401 
1402 
1403 
1404 
1405 
1407 
1411 

1413 
1414 
1415 
1417 
1419 
1420 
1422 
1424 
1429 
1430 
1431 
1435 
1444 
1447 
1450 



Renewal of French war. 

Battle of Poitiers. i 

Treaty of Bretigny. | 

The Black Prince victorious at Najara. 

Statute of Kilkenny. 

Renewal of French war. 

Wyclifs treatise "Be Dominio.''' 

Storms of Limoges. 

Victory of Spanish fleet off Rochelle. 

Revolt of Aquitaine. 

The Good Parliament. 

Its work undone by the Duke of Lancaster. 

Wyclif before the Bishops of London. 

Kicliard tlie Second, died 1399. 

Gregory XI. denounces Wyclifs heresy. 

Longland's "Piers the Ploughman.'" 

Wyclifs declaration against Transubstan- 

tiation. 
The Peasant Revolt. 
Condemnation of Wyclif at Blackfriars. 
Suppression of the Poor Preachers. 
Death of Wyclif. ' 

Barons force Richard to dismiss the Earl 

of Suffolk. 
Truce with France. 
Richard in Ireland. 
Richard marries Isabella of France. 
Truce with, prolonged. 
Murder of the Duke of Gloucester. 
Richard's plans of tyranny. 
Deposition of Richard. 
Henry tlie Fourth, died 1413. 
Revolt of Owen Glendower in Wales. 
Statute of Heretics. 
Battle of Homildon Hill. 
Revolt of the Percies. 
French descents on England. 
Revolt of Archbishop Scrope. 
French attack Gascony. 
English force sent to aid Duke of Pnrgundy 

in France. 
Menry tise Fifth j died 1422. 
Lollard Conspiracy. 
Battle of Agincourt. 
Henry invades Normandy. 
Alliance with Duke of Burgundy. 
Treaty of Troyes. 
Henry the Sixth, died 1471. 
Battle of Vernenil. 
Siege of Orleans. 
County Suffrage restricted. 
Death of Joan of Arc. 
Congress of Arras. 
Marriage of Margaret of Anjon. 
Death of Duke of Gloucester. 
Impeachment and death of Dulie of Suffolk. 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



XV 



1450 
[451 
1454 
1455 
1456 
[459 
.460 



1461 



Cade's Insurrection. 

Loss of Normandy and Guienne. 

Duke of York named Protector. 

First battle of St. Albans. 

End of York's Protectorate. 

Failure of Yorkist revolt. 

Battle of Northampton. 

York acknowledged as successor. 

Battle of Wakefield. 

Second battle of St. Albans. 

Battle of Mortimer's Cross. 

Edward tlie Fonrtli, died 1484. 



1461 
1464 
14T0 

1471 
1475 
1476 
1483 



14Si 



Battle of Towton. 

Edward marries Lady Grey. 

Warwick driven to France. 

Flight of Edward to Burgundy. 

Battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury. 

Edward invades France. 

Caxton settles in England. 

Murder of Ed^vard the Fifth. 

ISichard the Third, died 1485, 

Buckingham's insurrection. 

Battle of Bosworth. 



THE TUDORS. 



1485-1603. 



[485 Henry the Seventh, died 1509. 
1487 Conspiracy of Lambert Simnel. 
■489 Treaty with Ferdinand and Isabella. 
.491 Henry invades France. 
1 49 6 Cornish Rebellion. 

Perkin Warbeck captured. 
.497 Sebastian Cabot lands in America. 
[499 Colet and Erasmus at Oxford. 
[501 Arthur Tudor marries Catharine of Aragon. 
[502 Margaret Tudor marries James the Fourth. 
[505 CoUt Bean of St. PauVs. 
.509 Henry the Eighth, died 1547. 

Erasmus writes the "■Praise of Folly." 

.512 War with France. Colet founds St. PauVs 

School. 
i513 Battles of the Spurs and of Flodden. 

Wolsey becomes chief Minister. 
.516 More's " Utopia. " 
517* Luther denounces Indulgences. 

519 Field of Cloth of Gold. 

520 Luther burns the Pope's Bull. 

521 Quarrel of Luther with Henry the Eighth. 

522 Renewal of French war. 

523 Wolsey quarrels with the Commons. 

524 Exaction of Benevolences defeated. 

525 Peace with France. Tyndal translates the 
I Bible. 

527 Henry resolves on a Divorce. Persecution 

of Protestants. 
529 Fall of "Wolsey. Ministry of Norfolk and 

More. 

531 King acknowledged as "Supreme Head of 

the Church of England." 

532 Statute of Appeals. Anne Boleyn crowned. 
534 Acts of Supremacy and Succession. 

; 535 Cromwell Vicar-General. Death of More. 
Overthrow of the Geraldines in Ireland. 
)36 English Bible issued. 

Dissolution of lesser Monasteries. 
537 Pilgrimage of Grace. 

Ii38 Execution of Lord Exeter and Lady Salis- 
bury. 
i39 Law of Six Articles. 
i' Suppression of greater Abbeys. 



1542 



1543 

1547 



1548 
1549 

1551 

1552 
1553 

1554 

1555 
1556 

1557 
1558 
1559 



1560 
1561 

1562 



1 563 

1 565 
1566 

1567 

1568 
1589 
1571 

1573 



1 575 



Completion of the Tudor Conquest of Ire- 
land. 

Fall of Cromwell. 

Execution of Earl of Surrey. 

Ed-ward tlie Sixth, died 1553. 

Battle of Pinkie Cleugh. 

English Book of Common Prayer. 

Western Rebellion. End of Somerset's Pro- 
tectorate. 

Death of Somerset. 

Suppression of Chantries. 

Mary, died 1559. 

Chancellor discovers Archangel. 

Mary marries Philip of Spain. 

England absolved by Cardinal Pole. 

Persecution of Protestants begins. 

Burning of Archbishop Cranmer. 

War with France. 

Loss of Calais. 

Elizabeth, died 1603. 

restores Royal Supremacy and English 

Prayer-book. 

War in Scotland. 

Mary Stuart lands in Scotland. 

Rebellion of Shane O'Neill in Ulster. 

Elizabeth supports French Huguenots. 

First Penal Statute against Catholics, and 
first Poor Law. 

Hawkins begins Slave-trade with Africa. 

English driven out of Havre. 

Thirty-nine Articles imposed on clergy. 

Mary marries Darnley. 

Darnley murders Rizzio. 

Royal Exchange built. 

Bothwell murders Darnle}'. 

Defeat and death of Shane O'Neill. 

Mary flies to England. 

Revolt of the northern Earls. 

Bull of Deposition issued. 

Conspiracy and death of Norfolk. 

Rising of the Low Countries against Alva. 

Cartwright's "Admonition to the Parlia- 
ment." 

V/eatworth sent to the Tower. 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



1576 First public Theatre in Blackfriars. 
15'3"3' Landing of the Seminary Priests. 

— — - Drake sets sail for the Pacific. 
1578 Lyly's ' ' Euphues. " 

1 5 79 Spenser publishes " Shepherd's Calendar." 
1580 Campian and Parsons in England. 

Eevolt of the Desmonds. Massacre of 
Smerwick. 

1583 Plots to assassinate Elizabeth. 

New powers given to Ecclesiastical Com- 
mission. 

1584 Mnrder of Prince of Orange. 
Armada gathers in the Tagus. 

-• — -Colonization of Virginia. 

1585 English army sent to Netherlands. 
Drake on the Spanish Coast. 

1586 Battle of Zutphen. 
Babington's Plot. 
Shakspere m London. 



1587 Death of Mary Stuart. 

Drake bums Spanish fleet at Cadiz. 
Marlmoe's '^ Tamburlaine." 

1588 Defeat of the Armada. 
Martin Marprelate Tracts. 

1589 Drake plunders Cornnna. 

1 S^fi^ublication of the "Faerie Queeiie." 

1593 Shakspere's " Ve7ius and Adonis." 

1594 Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity." 
159®-' Jonson's "Every Man in his Humor." 

Descent upon Cadiz. 

1597 I Ruin of the Second Armada. 
I Bacon's "Essays." 

1 598 Eevolt of Hugh O'Neill. 

1599 Expedition of Earl of Essex in Ireland. 
1601 Execution of Essex. 

1603 Mountjoy completes the Conquest of Ire- 
laud. 
Death of Elizabeth, 



THE STUARTS. 
1603-1688. 



1"603 James the First, died 1625. 
Millenary Petition. 

1604 Parliament claims to deal with both Church 

and State. 
Hampton Court Conference. 

1605 Gunpowder Plot. 

Bacon's "Adva7icement of Learning.'" 
1610 Parliament's Petition of Grievances. 
Plantation of Ulster. 

1613 Marriage of the Elector Palatine. 

1614 First quarrels with the Parliament. 

1615 Trial of the Earl of Somerset. 
Disyace of Chief-Justice Coke. 
Sale of Peerages. 

Proposals for the Spanish Marriage. 

1616 Death of Shakspere. 

1617 Bacon Lord Keeper. 
Expedition and death of Ealeigh. 
The Declaiation of Sp'orts. 

1618 Beginning of Thirty-Years' War. 

1620 Invasion of t\ie Palatinate. 
Bacoji's "Novuin, Organum." 

Lauding of the Pilgrim Fathers in New 

England. 
Impeachment of Sacon. 

1621 James tears out i\ie Protestation of the 

Commons. 

1623 Journey of Charles to Madrid. 

1624 Resolve of War against Spain. 

1625 Cbarles tlie First, died 1649. 
First Parliament dissolve^. 
Failure of expedition against Cadiz. 

1626 Buckingham impeached. 
Second Parliament dissolved. 

1 627 Levy of Benevolences and Forced Loan. 
Failure of expedition to Rochelle. 

1S28 The Petition of Right. \ \ 



1628 Murder of Buckingham. 
Laud Bishop of London. 

1 629 Dissolution of Third Parliament. 
Charter granted to Massachusetts. 
Wentworth Lord President of the North. 

1630 Puritan Emigration to New England. 

1631 Wentworth Lord Deputy la Ireland. 

1633 Laud Archbishop of Canterbury. 
Milton's "Allegro" and " Penseroso." 
Prynne's " Histriomastix." 

1634 Milton's ' ' Comus. ' ' 

1636 Jnxon Lord Treasurer. 

Book of Canons and Common Prayer issued 
for Scotland. 

1637 Hampden refuses to pay Ship-money. 
Eevolt of Edinburgh. 

Trial of Hampden. 
1 6 3 S Milton's ' ' Lycidas. " 

The Scotch Covenant. 

1 639 Leslie at Dunse Law. 
Pacification of Berwick. 

1 640 The Short Parliament. 
The Bishops' War. 

Great Council of Peers at York. 
Long Parliament meets, A'ov. 

1641 Execution of Stratford, ilfa;/. 
Charles visits Scotland. 
The Irish Massacre, Oct. 

The Grand Remonstrance, Xov. 

1642 Impeachment of Five Members, Jan. i 
Charles before Hull, April. J j 
Eoyalists withdraw from Parliament. I 
Charles raises Standard at Nottingham, ^ \ { 
Battle of Edgehill, Oct. 23. 1 ' 
Ilobbes tcritea the "De Give." i 

1643 Assembly of Divines assembles at Wejit- 

minster. , 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



xvn 



1645 



1646 
1647 



164S 



1649 

1650 
1651 

1652 
1653 

1654 

1655 
1356 



Rising of the Cornishmen, May. 

Death of Hampden, June. 

Battle of Eouudway Down, July. 

Siege of Gloucester, Aug. 

Taking of the Covenant, Sept. 23. 

Fight at Cropredy Bridge, June. 

Battle of Marston Moor, July. 

Surrender of Parliamentary Army iu Corn- 
wall, Sept. 

Battle of Tippermuir, Sept. 

Battle of Newbury, Oct. 

Self-renouncing Ordinance, April. 

New Model raised. 

Battle of Naseby, June 14. 

Battle of Philiphaugh, Sept. 

Charles surrenders to the Scots, May. 

Scots surrender Charles to the Houses, Fel). 

Army elects Adjntators, April. 

The King seized at Holmby House, June. 

"Humble Eepreseutation" of the Array, 
June. 

Espulsiou of the Eleven Members. 

Army occupies London, Aug. 

Flight of the King, Nov. 

Secret Treaty of Charles with the Scots, Bee. 

Outbreak of the Eoyalist Revolt, Feb. 

Revolt of the Fleet, and of Kent, May. 

Fairfax and Cromwell in Essex and Wales, 
June-July. 

Battle of Preston, Aug. 18. 

Surrender of Colchester, Aug. 27. 

Pride's Purge, Dec. 

Jtoyal Society begins at Oxford. 

Execution of Charles I., Jan. 30. 

Scotland proclaims Charles II. 

England proclaims itself a Commonwealth. 

Cromwell storms Drogheda, Aug. 

Cromwell enters Scotland, May. 

Battle of Dunbar, Sept. 3. 

Battle of Worcester, Sept. 3. 

Union with Scotland and Ireland. 

Hobbes's "Leviathan." 

Outbreak of Dutch War, May. 

Victory of "Van Tromp, Xov. 

Victory of Blake, Feb. 

Cromwell drives out the Parliament,^pri7 19. 

Constituent Convention (Barebones Parlia- 
ment), July. 

Convention dissolves, Dec. 

The Instrument of Government. 

Oliver Crons^vell, I^ord Protect- 
or, died 105S. 

Peace concluded with Holland. 

First Protectorate Parliament, Sept. 

Dissolution of the Parliament, Jan. 

The Major-Generals. 

Settlement of Scotland and Ireland. 

Settlement of the Church. 

Blake in the Mediterranean. 

War with Spain and Conquest of Jamaica. 

Second Protectorate Parliament, Sept. 
2 



Blake's victory at Santa Cruz. 

Cromwell refuses title of King. 

Act of Government. 

Parliament dissolved, Feb. 

Battle of the Dunes. 

Capture of Dunkirk. 

Death of Cromwell, Sept. 3. 

ISicliard. Cromtvellj I^ord. Frio- 

tector, died 1712. 
Third Protectorate Parliament. 
Parliament dissolved. 
Long Parliament recalled. 
Long Parliament agaiu driven out. 
Monk enters London. 
The " Convention" Parliament. 
Cliarles the Second, lands at ijover, 

May, died 16S5. | . 

Union of Scotland and Ireland undone. / 
Cavalier Parliament begins. / 

Act of Uniformity re-enacted. 
Puritan clergy driven out. 
Royal Society at London. 
Dispensing Bill fails. 
Conventicle Act. 
Dutch War begins. 
Five-Mile Act. 
Plague and Fire of London. 
Neioton^s Theory of Fluxions, 
The Dutch in the Medway. 
Dismissal of Clarendon. 
Peace of Breda. 
Lewis attacks Flanders. 
Milton's "Paradise Lost." 
The Triple Alliance. 
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. 
Ashley shrinks back from tole/'dtioiJ5 to 

Catholics. ' 

Treaty of Dover. 

Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" writteiij 
Milton's "Paradise Regained" and "Shseii 



-f 



1657 

1658 

1659 
1660 

1661 

1662 

1663 
1664 

1665 
1667 

1668 
1669 
1670 
1671 



Newton's Theory of Light. 
Closing of the Exchequer. 

1672 Declaration of Indulgence. 
War begins with Holland. / 
Ashley made Chancellor. ; 
Declaration of Indulgence withdrew .. 

1673 The Test Act. 
Shaftesbury dismissed. 
Shaftesbury takes the lead of the Cc 

Party. 1 

1674 Bill of Protestant Securities fails. 
Charles makes peace with Holland. , — ^ 
Danby Lord T^reasnrer. ' 
Treaty of mutual aid between Charles ai: 

Lewis. ,' 
Shaftesbury j^ent to the Tower. 
Bill for Seciwity of the Church fails. 
Address of the Commons for War wi 

Pranc'l?/ 
Prince of Orange marries Mary. 



167i 



1676 
1677 



(. 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



j73 Peace of Nimeguen. 

Gates invents the Popish Plot. 

Fall of Danby. 

New Ministry with Shaftesbury at its head. 

Temple's plan for a new Council. 
;79 New Parliament meets. 

Habeas Corpus Act passed. 

Exclusion Bill introduced. 

Parliament dissolved. 

Shaftesbury dismissed. 
I ?0 Committee for agitation formed. 

Monmouth pretends to the throne. 

Petitioners and Abhorrers. 

Exclusion Bill thrown oat by the Lords. 

Trial of Lord Stafford. 

Parliament at Oxford. 

Limitation Bill rejected. 

Monmouth and Shaftesbury arrested. 

Conspiracy and flight of Shaftesbury. 

Eye-house Plot. 

Death of Shaftesbury. 

Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney executed. 

Town charters quashed. 

Army increased. 



1685 James tbe Second, died 1701. 

Insurrection of Argyle and Monmouth. 

Battle of Sedgemoor, July 6. 

The Bloody Circuit. 

Array raised to 20,000 men. 

Eevocation of Edict of Nantes. 
16S6 Parliament refuses to repeal Test Act. 

Test Act dispensed with by Eoyal authority. 

Ecclesiastical Commission set up. 

1687 J^'ewton's " rrincipia." 

Expulsion of the Fellows of Magdalen. 

Dismissal of Lords Eochester and Clarendon. 

Declaration of Indulgence. 

The boroughs regulated. 

William of Orange protests agaiust the 

Declaration. 
Tyrconnell made Lord Deputy in Ireland. 

1688 Clergy refuse to read Declaration of Indul- 

gence. 
Threat of the Seven Bishops. 
Irish troops brought over to England. 
Lewis attacks Germany. 
William of Orange lands at Torbay. 
Flight of James. 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



1689-1874. 



S9 Convention Parliament. 
Declaration of Rights. 
Wflliam and Mary made King 
and Queen. 

William forms the Grand Alliance against 

Battle of Killiecrankie, Juhj 27. [Lewis. 

Ciege of Londonderry. 

Mutiny Bill. 

Toleration Bill. 

Bill of Eights. 

Secession of the Nonjurors. 
)0 Abjuration Bill and Act of Grace. 

Battle of Beachy Head, June 29. 

Battle of the Boyne, July 6. 

William repulsed from Limerick, 
il Battle of Aughrim, Jit?!/. 

Capitulation and Treaty of Limerick. 
i2 Massacre of Glencoe. 

Battle of La Hogue, May 19. 
I Sunderland's plan of a Ministry, 
i Bank of England set up. 

Death of Mary. 
8 Cun-ency restored. 

Peace of Eyswick. 

First Partition Treaty. 

Second Partition Treaty. 

Duke of Anjou becomes King of Spain. 

Death of James the Second. 

Act of Settlement passed: 

Anne, died 1714. 

Battle of Blenheim, August 13. 

Harley and St. John take office. 

05 Victories of Peterborough in Spain. 

06 Battle of Eamillies, May 23. 



1698 
700 
701 



ro2 

04 



1707 
1708 

1709 
1710 

1712 
1713 
1714 

1715 
1716 

1717 
1718 
1720 

1721 
1722 
1727 

1729 
1730 
1731 
1733 



1737 
1738 
1739 
1740 
1742 
1743 



Act of Union with Scotland. 
Battle of Oudenarde. 
Dismissal of Harley and St. John. 
Battle of Malplaquet. 
Trial of Sacheverel. 
Tory Ministry of Harley and St. John. 
Dismissal of Marlborough. 
Treaty of Utrecht. 
George the First, died 1T27. 
Ministry of Townshend and Walpole. 
Jacobite Revolt under Lord Mar. 
Ministry of Lord Stanhope. 
The Septennial Bill. 
The Triple Alliance. 
The Quadruple Alliance. 
Failure of the Peerage Bill. 
The South Sea Company. 
Ministry of Sir Eobert Walpole. 
Exile of Bishop Atterbury. 
War with Austria and Spain. 
George tl»e Second, died 1760. 
Treaty of Seville. 

Free exportation of American rice allowed. 
Treaty of Vienna. 
Walpole's Excise Bill. 
War of the Polish Succession. 
Family Compact between France and Spain. 
Death of Queen Caroline. 
The Methodists appear in London. 
War declared with Spain. 
War of the Austrian Succession. 
Eesignation of Walpole. 
Ministry of Henry Pelham. 
Jll£Of DetHno-pi - - «T 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



XIX 



17-45 Battle of Fontenoy, May 31. 

Charles Edward lauds in Scotland. 

Battle of Prestonpan?, Sept. 21. 

Charles Edward reaches Derby, Bee. 4. 
1 746 Battle of Falkirk, Jan. 23. 

Battle of Culloden, April 16. 
1748 Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. 
1751 Clive's surprise of Arcot. 

1754 Death of Henry Pelham. 
Ministry of Duke of Newcastle. 

1755 The Seven-Years' War. 
Defeat of General Braddock. 

1756 Loss of Port Mahon. 
Ketreat of Admiral Byng. 

1757 Convention of Closter-Seven. 
Ministry of William Pitt. 
Battle of Plassey, June 23. 

1758 Capture of Louisburg and Cape Breton. 
Capture of Fort Duquesue. 

1759 Battle of Minden, Aug. 1. 
Battle of Quiberon Bay, Nov. 20. 
Capture of Fort Niagara and Ticonderoga. 
Wolfe's victory on Heights of Abraham. 

1760 George tlie Third, died 1820. 
Battle of Waudewash. 

1761 Ministry of Lord Bute. 
Brindley''s Canal over the Irwell. 

1763 Peace of Paris. 

1763 Wedgwood establishes Potteries. 

1764 Har greaves invents Spinning- Jenny. 

1765 Stamp Act passed. 
Ministry of Lord Rockingham. 

Meeting and Protest of American Congress. 
Watt invents Steam-engine. 

1766 Repeal of the Stamp Act. 
Ministry of Lord Chatham. 

1768 Ministry of the Duke of Grafton. 
Wilkes expelled from House of Commons. 
Arkwright invents Spinning-machine. 

1769 Wilkes three times elected for Middlesex. 
House of Commons seats Col. Luttrell. 
Occupation of Boston by British troops. 
Letters of Junius, 

1770 Ministry of Lord North. 

Chatham proposes Parliamentary Reform. 

1771 Last attempt to prevent Parliamentary re- 

porting. 
Beginning of the great English Journals. 

1773 Hastings appointed Governor-General. 
Boston tea-ships. 

1 774 Military occupation of Boston. Port closed. 
Massachusetts Charter altered. 
Congress assembles at Philadelphia. 

1775 Rejection of Chatham's plan of conciliation. 
Skirmish at Lexington. 

Americans, under Washington, besiege Bos- 
Battle of Bunker's Hill. [ton. 
Southern Colonies expel their Governors. 

1776 Crompton invents the Mule. 
Arnold invades Canada. 
Evacuation of Boston. 
Declaration of Independence, July 4. 
Battles of Brooklyn and Trenton. 



1 776 Adam Smith's " Wealth of Nations.'" 

1777 Battle of Brandy wine. 
Surrender of Saratoga, Oct. 13. 
Chatham proposes Federal Union. 
Washington at Valley Forge. 

1778 Alliance of France with United States. 
Death of Chatham, April 7. 

1779 Alliance of Spain with United States. 
Siege of Gibraltar. 

Armed Neutrality of Northern Powers. 
The Irish Volunteers. 

1780 Coruwallis captures Charleston. 
Descent of Hyder Ali on the Carnatic. 

1781 Defeat of Hyder at Porto Novo. 
Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktowii. 

1783 Ministry of Lord Rockingham. 
Victories of Rodney. 
Repeal of Poyuing's Act. 
Pitt's Bill for Parliamentary Reform. 
Burke's Bill of Economical Reform. 
Shelburne Ministry. 
Repulse of Allies from Gibraltar. 
Treaties of Paris and Versailles. 

1783 Coalition Ministry of Fox and North. 
Fox's India Bill. 

Ministry of Pitt. 

1784 Pitt's India Bill. 
Sinking Fund and Excise. 

1785 Parliamentary Reform Bill. 

Free-trade Bill between England and Irft- 

1786 Trial of Warren Hastings. [land. 

1787 Treaty of Commerce with France. 

1788 The Regency Bill. 

1789 Meeting of States-General at Versailles. 
New French Constitution. 

Triple Alliance for defense of Turkey. 

1790 Quarrel over Nootka Sound. 
Pitt defends Poland. 

Burke's "Reflections on the French Revohition." 

1791 Representative Government set up in Canada. 
Fox's Libel Act. 

Burke's "Appeal from Keio to Old Whigs." 
1793 Pitt hinders Holland from joining the Co- 
France opens the Scheldt. [alition. 
Pitt's efforts for peace. 
The United Irishmen. 

1793 France declares War on England. 
Part of Whigs join Pitt. 
English army lauds in Flanders. 

1 794 English driven from Toulon. 
English driven from Holland. 
Suspension of Habeas Corpus Act. 
Victory of Lord Howe, June 21. 

1796 Battle of Cape St. Vincent. 

Burke's "Letters mi a Regicide Peace." 

1797 England alone in the War with Prance. 
Battle of Camperdown. 

1798 Irish revolt crushed at Vinegar Hill. 
Battle of the Nile. 

1799 Pitt revives the Coalition against France. 
Conquest of Mysore. 

1 800 Surrender of Malta to English Fleet. 
Armed Neutrality of Northern Powe's. 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



1800 
1801 



1802 
1803 



1805 
1806 



1807 



1808 
1809 



1810 
1811 



1812 



1SI3 



l814 



1815 



1819 
1820 



1822 
1823 
1826 

1S27 



Act of Union witti Ireland. 

George the Third rejects Pitt's plan of 

Catholic Emancipation. 
Administration of Mr. Addiugtou. 
Surrender of French army in Egypt. 
Battle of Copenhagen. 
Peace of Amiens. 

Publication of ^'■Edinburgh Review." 
Bonaparte declares War. 
Battle of Assaye. 
Second Ministry of Pitt. 
Battle of Trafalgar, Oct. 21. 
Death of Pitt, Jan. 23. 
Ministry of Lord Grenville. 
Death of Pox. 
Orders in Council. 
Abolition of Slave-trade. 
Ministry of Duke of Portland. 
Seizure of Danish fleet. 
America passes Non-Intercourse Act. 
Battle of Vimiera and Convention of Cintra. 
Battle of Cornuua, Jan. 16. 
Wellesley drives Sonlt from Oporto, 
Battle of Talavera, July 2T. 
Expedition against Walcheren. 
Ministry of Spencer Perceval. 
Revival of Parliamentary Keforra. 
Battle of Busaco. 
Lines of Torres Vedras. 
Prince of Wales becomes Eegent. 
Battle of Fuentes de Onore, May 5. 
Wellington repulsed from Badajoz and Al- 
Lnddite Eiots. [meida. 

Assassination of Spencer Perceval. 
Ministry of Lord Liverpool. 
Storm of Ciudad Eodrigo and Badajoz. 
America declares War agaiust England. 
Battle of Salamanca, July 22. 
Wellington retreats from Burgos. 
Victories of American Frigates. 
Battle of Vittoria, June 21. 
Battles of the Pyrenees. 
Wellington enters France, Oct, 
Americans attack Canada. 
Battle of Orthez. 
Battle of Toulouse, April 10. 
Battle of Chippewa, July. 
Raid upon Washington. 
British repulsed at Plattsburg and New Or- 
Battle of Quatre Bras, June 16. [leans. 

Battle of Waterloo, June IS. 
Treaty of Vienna. 
Manchester Massacre. 
Cato Street Conspiracy. 
George tlie Fourtli, died 1830. 
Bill for the Queen's Divorce. 
Canning Foreign Minister. 
Mr. Huskisson joins the Ministry. 
Expedition to Portugal. 
Recognition of South American States. 
Ministry of Mr. Canning. 
Ministry of Lord Goderich. 
Battle of Navarino. 



1828 Ministry of the Duke of Wellington. 

1829 Catholic Emancipation Bill. 

1830 TVilliam the Fourtli, died 1837. 
Ministry of Lord Grey. 

Opening of Liverpool and Manchester R. R. 

1831 Reform Agitation. 

1832 Parliamentary Reform Bill passed, June 7. 

1833 Suppression of Colonial Slavery. 
East India trade thrown open. 

1834 Ministry of Lord Melbourne. 
New Poor Law. 

System of National Education begun. 
Ministry of Sir Robert Peel. 

1835 Ministry of Lord Melbourne replaced. 
Municipal Corporation Act. 

1836 General Registration Act. 
Civil Marriage Act. 

ISS'? Victoria. 

1839 Committee of Privy Council for Education in- 
Demands for a People's Charter, [stituted. 
Formation of Anti-Corn-Law League. 
Revolt in Canada. 

War with China. 
Occupation of Cabul. 

1840 Quadruple Alliance with France, Portugal, 
Bombardment of Acre. [and Spain. 

1841 Ministry of Sir Robert Peel. 
Income Tax revived. 
Peace with China. 

Massacre of English army in Affghanistan. 

1842 Victories of Pollock in Affghanistan. 

1845 Battles of Moodkee and Ferozeshah. 

1846 Battle of Sobraon. 
Annexation of Scinde. 
Repeal of the Corn Laws. 

1841" Ministry of Lord John Russell. 

1848 Suppression of the Cliartists and Irish rebels. 

Victory of Goojerat. 

Annexation of the Punjaub. 

1852 Ministry of Lord Derby. 

1853 Ministry of Lord Aberdeen. 

1854 Alliance with France agaiust Russia. 
Siege of Sebastopol. 

Battle of Inkermann, Nov. 5. 

1855 Ministry of Lord Palmerston. 
Capture of Sebastopol. 

1856 Peace of Paris with Russia 
185 7 Sepoy Mutiny in Bengal. 

185 8 Sovereignty of India transferred to the 
Volunteer movement. [Crovrn. 

Second Ministry of Lord Derby. 

1859 Second Ministry of Lord Palmerston. 

1865 Ministry of Lord Russell. 

1 866 Third Ministry of Lord Derbj'. 

1867 Parliamentary Reform Bill. 
Ministry of Mr. Disraeli. 

1 868 Ministry of Mr. Gladstone. 
Abolition of compulsory Church Rates. 

1 869 Disestablishment of Episcopal Church iu Ire- 

1870 Irish Land Bill. Education Bill. [land. 

1871 Abolition of Religions Tests in Universities. 
Army Bill. Ballot Bill. 

1874 Second Ministry of Mr. Disraeli. 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



KINGS OP THE HOUSE OF CERDIC, FROM ECGBERHT. 



ECGBERHT, 

r. 802-837. 

I 

^THELWULP, 

r. 837-858, 



^THELBALD, 
r. S5S-8C0. 



^THELBERHT, 
r. S60-S0O. 



^THELRED I., 
r. 866-871. 



ALFRED : 
r. 871-901. 



; EalhswUTi. 



EADWARD 

THE ELDEU, 

r. 901-925. 



^THELSTAN, 
r. 925-940. 



EADMUND : 
r. 940-916. 



: ^Ifip'fU. 



EADRED, 
r. 946-955. 



EADWno, 
r. y55-9t9. 



1. JEthelflcBd = EADGAR, 
I r. 959-975. 



: 2. JSlfthrijth, 



EADWARD 

THE MAKTYli, 

r. 975-979. 


1 
JND 
il23- 
101 C 

Eald 
1 


1. Name — 
uncertain. 


^THELREDII.,= 
r. 979-1016. 


= 2. Emma of 
Sormanchj — 5 

1 '" 


. Cunt, 
1017-1035. 


EADMT 
r. Apr 

m. 


lUONSIBE, 

Nov. 30, 

gyth. 


Ealfred, 
killed 1030. 


EADWARD 

THE 

OONFESSOE, 

r. 1042-1000. 


Harthaennt 
r. 1040-1042. 


Eadmnnd. 




\ 
Eadward, 

d. 1057, 
m. Aqatiia. 

1 




Eadgar, 

elected 

King in 

1066. 




Marsha ret, 

d. 1093, 

m. Malcolm iH. 

King of Scots. 


Chrislina, 
auun. 








Matilda, 

d. Ills, 

m. Henry I. 

Kivfi of 

UnglanoU 









DANISH KINGS. 



THE DANISH KINGS. 



3WEGEN PORKBEAED, 
d. 1014. 



CNUT = Emma of Normandy, widow 
r. 1017-1035. 1 of King jEthelred II. 



Swegen. HAROLD I., HARTHACNUT, 

r. 1035-1040. r. 1040-1042. 



Illegitimate. 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



DUKES OP THE NORMANS. 





ROLF, 






1st Duke of the Normans, 






r. 911-927. 
[ 






WILLIAM 






LONGBWOKI), 






r. 92T-943. 

1 






RICHARD 






TUE FEAEI.ESS, 






r. 943-996. 

1 






EICHARD Emma, 






THE GOon, m. 1. Jithelred II. 


, 0/ 




r. 996-1026. England. 






1 m. 2. Cnut of Ennland 




1 and Denmark. 




EICHARD III., 


ROBERT 




r. 1026-102S. 


THE MAGNIPIOENT, 

r. 1028-1035. 
WILLIAM 

THE CONQUEROE, 

r. 1035-108T. 
1 




1 
EGBERT II., 


WILLIAM HENRY L, 


Adela, 


r. lOST-1096 


EtiFus, r. 1106-1135. 


w. Stephen, 


(from 1096 to 1100 


r. 1096-1100. 1 


Count of Blois. 


the Duchy was 


1 


1 


held by his 


Matilda, 


STEPHEN 


brother William), 


m. GEOFFRT, 


OF liT.OIS, 


and 1100-llOG 


COCNT OF ANJOU 


8. 1135. 


(when he was over- 


AND MAINF. 




thrown at Tinche- 


(who won the 




brai by his 


Duchy from 




brother Henry). 


Stephen). 

HENRY II. 

invested with the 

Duchy 1150, 

d. 11S9. 

1 






1 
RICHARD 


1 

JOHN, 




THE LION-HEART, 


r. 1199-1204 




r. 1189-1199. • (when Nor 


mandy was conquered 
by France). 



EDWARD III— HENRY IV. 



Claim of EDWARD III. to the French Crown. 



1 

PHILIP IV. 

THE FAIK, 

r. 1285-1314. 
I 



PHILIP in. 

THE BOT,T>, 

r. 1270-12S5. 



LEWIS X., 

r. 1314-1316. 



JOHN I. 

15 N0V.-19 Nov. 

1316. 



PHILIP V. 

THE LONG, 

r. 1316-1322. 



CHARLES IV. 

THE FATE, 

r. 1322-1328. 



Isabel, 

VI. Edioard II. 

of England. 

Edward III. 
of Euglaud. 



Charles, Connt 

of Valois, 

d. 1325. 



PHILIP VI. 

OP VALOIS, 

r. 1328-1350. 

I 
JOHN IL 

THE GOOD, 

r. 1350-13C4. 



Descent of HENRY IV. 

HENRY III. 



EDWARD I. 



EDWARD II. 



EDWARD in. 



Edmund, 
Earl of Lancaster. 



Thomas, 

Earl of Laucaster, 

beheaded, 1322. 



Henry, 
Earl of Lancaster. 



Henry, 

Duke of Laucaster. 

I 



John of Gaunt, = Blanche 
Duke of Lancaster. I of Lancaster, 

HENRY IV. 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



HOUSE OF 

EDWARD 



Lionel, Duke 

of Clarence. 

i 

Philippa, 

■m. mdmund 

Mortimer, 

Earl of March. 

Roger Movtimer, 
Earl of March. 



Edmund 

Mortimer, 

Earl of March, 

d. 1424. 



Anne Morti- 



Richard 
Duk^ of 
slain at 



EDWARD IV. 



I 
Edmund, 
Earl of Rutland, 
slain at Wake- 
field, 1460. 



EDWARD 


Richard, 


Elizabeth, 


V. 


Duke of 


m. HENRY 




York. 


vn. 



George, 

Duke of 

Clarence, 

m. Isabel Neville. 

I 



Katharine, 


Edward, Margaret, 


m. Sir 


Earl of Countess of 


William 


Warwick, Salisbury, 


Coiirtenay. 


beheaded beheaded 






1499. 1541, 






m. Sir Richard 




nrv 


Pole. 
1 


He 


Henry Pole, 


Courtenay, 


Lord 


Marquis 


Montagu, 


of Exeter, 


beheaded 


beheaded 


1538. 


1538. 




Edward 




Conrtenay, 




Earl of Devon, 




d.l 


556. 





HOUSE OF YORK. 



YORK. 

III. 



Edmund of 

Langley, 

Dnke of York. 



mer = Richard, 
I Earl of Cam- 
bridge, 
I beheaded 1415. 
Plantagenet, 
York, 
Wakefield, 1460. 



RICHARD III. 

m. Anne XeviUe. 



Edward, 

Prince of Wales, 

d. 14S4. 



Elizabeth = John de. la Pole, 
Duke of Suffolk. 



John de la Pole, 

Earl of Lincoln, 

slaiu at Stoke, 14S7. 



Margaret, 

m. Charles, Duke cf 

Burgundy. 



Edmund de la Pole, 
Earl of Snffolk, 
beheaded 1513. 



Richard de la Pole, 

slain at the battle 

of Pavia, 1525. 



Reginald Pole, 

Archbishop of 

Canterbury, 

and Cardinal, 

d. 1558. 



XXVlll 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



U 












-ca 2 "^"^ 



c c2 a 



£t< 



« 




1^1 


1^ 




g 




1 




92 

<i 
O 

<! 

Hi 






1 


1^1 






5?^-^ 


h 


R 






«lc§ 


O 


O 


n 




g-^ 


|3 










O 

b4 


(-1 












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s^ a 



C3 o 



P 






Sn 



-2 (1) it's 

5 Wg 



-O © O S (vi o 



go42c- 



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o 


p 






3 


a 


0) 






K- O* 


t^ 






■j-S 


11 


!^? 


o 




J2 


a-" 




O 


ja 


Si 






W;2 


e4 

II 


^ 




o 


o 

3t« c 




> 








SS.I 




>-"§^ 








s w 




:?5 .8 S 








w 




























£1 



DAUGHTERS OF HENRY VII. 



5 1 c^-. 











j3 . Ss^-" S 
















r3 O 








SS'-K 




'5 S B g 








2. CAa?-2 
Brando 
Luke c 
Suffolk 

randou, 
Orev, 
uffoik. 


M Kicg 


f^H:^ 


o S 






11 


FQ e?_ 






5?S§ 


H 










— CQ ?CQ 


M 
> 




— 5 








III 




11 









11 












II 




S'^* 








^ 


Hi 




S S B 




•' to 
.a 




3 


O 




l^t^ 








Is 


01 




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CSt^ 


P^ 














pq 












s 


H 












<! 


» 

















i-i 






^-^ 






D 


^ 






II 






<i 


b- 






w 3 






















Is 


t Douglas, 
ew Stuart, 
Lennox. 
1 


Op£| 






o 




2^ 












as 


®5'S> 








01 




r=> "^ 










EH 




p s 










<1 




^f^ 


lg^ 


. 








in" 




"^S? 






Q 








c^ 






^ 




11 




^S 






H 














O 




1 




g-ci 










— to 
a 




"1 













= o 



C? 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



THE SOVEREIGNS 
Since the 



WILLIAM I., 
«i. Matilda 



Eobert, 

Duke of Normaudj', 

b. about 1056, 

d. 1134. 

William, 

Count of Flanders, 

b. 1101, d. 1128. 



WILLIAM II., 

b. about 1060, 

d. 1100. 



} 



Henry, 
b. 1155, d. 1183. 



RICHARD I., 

b. 1157, d. 1199. 



SOVEREIGNS OF ENGLAND. 



OP ENGLAND 
Norman Conquest. 



■b. about 102T, d. 10S7. 
of Flanders. 



HENRY I., 

b. 1068, 

d. 1135. 

m. 1. Matilda o/ 

Scotland. 

Matilda, 

d. IIGT, 
m. 2. Geoffrey, 

Count of 

Anjou. 

I 

HENRY II., 

b. 1133, d. 1189. 

Ml. Eleanor of 

Aquitaine. 



Geoffrey, 

b. 1158, d. IISG. 

m. Constance, 

heiress of 

Brittany. 

Arthur, 

Duke of 

Brittany, 

b. IIST. 



Adela, 

d. 113T. 

m. Stephen, 

Co%tnt of 

Blois. 

I 

STEPHEN, 

d. 1154. 

m. Matilda 

of Boulogne. 

I 



Eustace, 

Count of 

Boulogne, 

d. 1153. 



I 
JOHN, 

b. reo, d. 121 G. 

m. 2. Isabel of 

AngouUme. 

HENRY III., 

b. 120T, d. 12T2. 

m. Eleanor of 

Provence. 

EDWARD I., 

b. 1239, d. 130T. 

m. 1 . Eleanor 

of Castile. 

EDWARD II., 

h. 1284, 

murdered 132T. 

TO. Isabel of 

France. 

I 

EDWARD III., 

b. 1312, d. ISTT. 

m. Philippa of 

Hainault. 

iSee next page.} 



William, 

Count of 

Boulogne, 

d. 1160. 



XXXll 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



THE SOVEREIGNS 

EDWARD 



Edward, 
Prince of 
Wales, 
b. 1330, 
d. 13T6. 


Lionel, 1. Blanche, - 
Duke of daughter of 
Clarence, Henry, DuJee of 
b. 1338, Lancaster. 
d. 1368, 


- 


John of Gaunt, := 

Duke of 

Lancaster, 

b. about 1340, 

d. 1399. 


= 3. Katharitia 
Swyiiford. 


EICHARD II., 

b. 1366. 

deposed 

1399. 


Philippa, 

m. Edmund 

Mortimer, 

Earl of 

March. 


HENRY IV., 

b. 1366, d. 1413. 

m. 1. Marj; de 

Bohun. 




John Beaufort, 
Earl of Somerset. 




Roger 

Mortimer, 

Earl of 

March. 

■ 1 


HETSTRY v., 

b. 1388, d. 1425 

m. Katharine c 

France, who 

HENRY VI 

b. 1421, 

d. 1471. 

tn. Margaret c 

Arijou. 


/_ 

T 


2. Owen Tudor. 


John Beaufort, 
Duke of 
Somerset. 


Edmund 
Mortimer, 
Earl of 
March, 
d. 1424. 


Anne 
Mortimer, 
171. Richard, 

Earl of 

Cambridge, 

who was 

beheaded. 


/ 


Edmund - 
Tudor, 
Earl of 
Richmond. 


= Marg 
Beau 


aret 
fort. 




1 






1415. 


Edward, 

Prince of Wales, 

b. 1453, 

slain at 

Tewkesbury, 

1471. 




HENRY VIT., 
b. 1456, d. 1509. 



i. Katharine 
ofAragon. 



HENRY VIIL, 
b. 1491, d. 1547. 



— 2. Anne Boleyn. 



MARY, 

b. 1516, d. 1558. 

m. Philip of Spain. 



ELIZABETH, 
b. 1583, d. 1603. 



3. Jane Seymour, 



EDWARD VI., 
b. 1537, d. 1558. 



SOVEREIGNS OF'f-ENGLAND. 



XXXlll 



OP ENGLAND— Continued. 



m. 



Edmund of 

Langley, 

Dnke of York, 

b. 1341, d. 1402, 



Eichard, 

Earl of Cambridge, 

beheaded 1415. 

m. Anne 

Mortimer. 

I 

Eichard Plaiitagenet, 

Duke of York, 

slain at 
Wakefield, 1460. 



EDWAED IV., 

b. 1442, d. 1483. 

m. Elizabeth 

Wydevile. 



George, Duke of 
Clarence, b. 1449, d. 1478. 



Elizabeth, 
d. 1503. 



EDWAED 

v., 

b. 14T0. 



I 

Margaret, 

b. 1489, d. 1541. 

m,. 1. James IV., 

King of Soots. 



James V., 

King of Scots, 

d. 1542. 

Mary, 

Queen of Scots, 

beheaded 158T. 

I 

JAMES I., 

b. 1566, d. 1625. 

. Aiine of Denm,arh 



Eichard, 
Duke of 

York, 
b. 1472. 



Edward, 

Earl of 

Warwick, 

beheaded 

1499. 



Margaret, 

Countess of 

Salisbury, 

beheaded 1541, 

m. Sir 

Richard 

Pole. 



EICHAED III., 
b. 1452, d. 1485. 
m. Anne Neville. 



Edward, 
Prince of Wales, 
b. 1473, d. 1484. 



Mary, 

b. 1498, d. 1533. 

in. 2. Charles 

Brandon, Duke of 

Suffolk. 

Frances Brandon, 
m. Henry Gre.i/, 
Duke of Suffolk, 

Jane Grey, 

beheaded 1554. 

m. Lord Guilford 

Dudley. 



[See next page.2 



XXXIV 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



THE SOVEREIGNS 



JAMES 



CHAELES I., 

b. 1600, beheaded 1G49. 

tn. Henrietta Maria of France. 



CHARLES II., 
b. 1630, d. 1085. 



1. Anne Hyde = 



MARY, 

b. 1662, 

d. 1694. 

m. 

WILLIAM 

III. 



I 

JAMES II., 

b. 1633. 

d. 1701. 



ANNE, 
b. 1G65, 
d. ITU. 



Charles 
Edward 

Stuart, the 
Young 

Pretender, 
b. 1720, 
d. 1788. 



2. Mary of 
Modcna. 



James Francis 

Edward Stuart, 

the Old 

Pretender, 

b. 1688, d. 1766. 



Heury 
Benedict 
Stuart, 
Cardinal 
York, 
b. 1725, 
d. 180T. 



I 

Mary, 

b. 1681, d. 1660. 

tn. William,, 
Prince of Orange. 



WIIXIAM III., 

b. 1650, d. 1702. 

m.MARY Ob' 

ESGLAND. 



SOVEREIGNS OF ENGLAND. xxxv 



OF ENGLAND— Coutiuued. 



Elizabefh, 

b. 1596, d. 1C02. 

m. Frederick, 

Elector Palatine. 

Sophia, 

d. ITM. 
m. 'Ernest Augustus, 
Elector of Hanover. 



GEOEGE I., 

b. IGGO, d. 1T2T. 

m. Sophia Dorothea 

ofZell. 



GEOEGE II., 

b. 1683, d. 1760. 

•m. Caroline </ 

Brandenhurg- 

A7ispach. 

Frederick, 
Prince ofWale?, 
b. irOT, d. 1751. 

I 

GEOEGE III., 

b. 1738, d. 1820. 

m. Charlotte of 

Mechlenburg- 

Strelitz. 

I 



GEOEGE IV., WILLIAM IV., Edward, Ernest Angushi?, 

b. 1762, d. 1830. b. 1765, d. 1S37. Dnke of Kent, King of Hanover, 

TO. Caroline of b. 1767, d. 1820. b. 1771, d. 1851. 

Brunsioick- I 

Wolfenbuttel. 

Charlotte, VICTOEIA, 

b. 1796, d. ISIT. b. 1819, 

w . Prince A Ibert of 

Saxe-Coburg and 

Gotha. 



V. 



HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 




STORY 



THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



CHAPTER L 

THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607-1013. 

Section I.— ESritaiii and the I<:nglisli. 

[Authorities for the'constitntion and settlement of the English, see Kemble's " Sax- 
ons in England," and especially the "Constitutional History of England," by Profess- 
or Stubbs. Sir Erancis Palgrave's History of the English Commonwealth is valua- 
ble, but to be used with care. A A'igorous and accurate sketch of the early constitu- 
tion may be found in Mr. Ereeman's History of the Norman Conquest, vol. i.] 



Foe the fatherland of the English race we must look for away 
from England itself In the fifth century after the birth of Christ, 
the one country which bore the name of England was what we 
now call Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula which 
parts the Baltic from the !N"orthern seas. Its pleasant pastures, 
its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking 
down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of 
heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, 
broken only on the Avestern side by meadows which crept down to 
the marshes and the sea. The dwellers in this district were one 
out of three tribes, all belonging to the same Low German branch 
of the Teutonic family, who at the moment when history discovers 
them were bound together into a confederacy by the ties of a com- 
mon blood and a common speech. To the north of the English lay 
the tribe of the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their dis- 
trict of Jutland. To the south of them the tribe of the Saxons 
wandered over the sand-flats of Holstein, and along the marshes 
of Friesland and the Elbe. How close was the union of these 
'''3S was shown by their use of a common name, Avhile the choice 
lis name points out the tribe which at the moment when we 
meet them must havt been strongest and most powerful in 
{. Although obey were all known as Saxons by the 
'dio touched them only on their southern border 
''welt, and who remained ignorant of the very 
.ish or the Jutes, the three tribes bore among 



confed 

nan 

are 

Str 



40 



HISTORY OF TBE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Seo. I. I themselves tlie name of the central tribe of their league, the name 
of Englishmen. 

Of the temper and life of these English folk in this Old England 
we know little. But, from the glimpses which we catch of them 
when conquest had brought these Englishmen to the shores of 
Britain, their political and social organization must have been 
that of the German race to which they belonged. The basis of 
their society was the free land-holder. In the Englisli tongue he 
alone was known as " the man," or " the churl ;" and two English 
phrases set his freedom vividly before us. He was " the free-neck- 
"ed man," whose long hair floated over a neck that had never bent 
to a lord. He was " the weajDoned man," who alone bore spear and 
sword, for he alone possessed the right which in such a state of 
society formed the main check upon lawless outrage, the right of 
private war. Justice had to spring from each man's personal ac- 
tion ; and every freeman was his own avenger. But, even in the 
earliest forms of English society of which we catch traces, this 
right of self-defense was being modified and restricted by a grow- 
ing sense of public justice. The " blood-wite," or compensation in 
money for personal wrong, was the first eflort of the tribe as a 
whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's life and the 
freeman's limb had each on this system its legal price. "Eye for 
eye," ran the rough code, and " life for life," or for each fair dam- 
ages. "We see a further step toward the recognition of a wrong 
as done not to the individual man, but to the people at large, in 
another custom of the very earliest times. The price of life or 
limb was paid, not by the wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but 
by the family or house of the wrong-doer to the family or house 
of the wronged. Order and law were thus made to rest in each 
little group of English people npon the blood-bond which knit its 
families together ; every outrage was held to have been done by all 
who were linked by blood to the doer of it, every crime to have 
been committed to all who were linked by blood to the sufferer 
from it. From this sense of the value of the family bond as a 
means of restraining the wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as 
a whole did not as yet possess sprang the first rude forms of Eu- 
glish justice. Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper, bound to 
protect him from wrong, to hinder him from wrong-doing, and to 
suffer with and pay for him if wrong were done. So fully was 
this principle recognized that, even if any man was charged before 
his fellow-tribesmen with crime, his kinsfolk still remained in fact 
his sole judges; for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence 
or his guilt that he had to stand or fall. 

The blood-bond gave both its military and social form to Old 
English society. Kinsmen fought side by side in the hour of bat- 
tle, and the feelings of honor and discipline were drawn fi'om the 
common duty of every man in each little group of warriors to his 
house. And as they fought side by side on the field, so they 
dwelt side by side on the soil. Harling abode by Harling, and 
Billing by Billing; and each "wick" or "ham" or " stead" or 
" tun" took its name from the kinsmen who dwelt toa-ether in it. 



I-] 



TRE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607-1013. 



41 



■ The home or "ha.ni" of the Billings would be Billingham, and the 
"tun" 01* town of the Harlings would be Harlington, But in such 
settlements, the tie of blood was widened into the larger tie of 
land. Land with the German race seems every where to have 
-L been the accompaniment of full freedom. The freeman was strict- 
p»ly the freeholder, and the exercise of his full rights as a free mem- 
ber of the community to which he belonged was inseparable from 
tlie possession of his " holding." The landless man ceased for all 
practical purposes to be free, though he was no man's slave. In 
the very earliest glimpse Ave get of the German race Ave see them 
a race of land-holders and land-tillers. Tacitus, the first Roman 
Avho looked closely at these destined conquerors of Rome, found 
them a nation of farmers, pasturing on the forest glades around 
their villages, and ploAving their village fields. A feature Avhich 
at once struck him as parting them from the civilized Avorld to 
Avhich he himself belonged Avas their hatred of cities and their 
love even Avithin tlieir little settlements of a jealous independence, 
"They live apart," he says, " each by himself, as Avoodside, plain, 
or fresh spring attracts him." And as each dweller Avithin the 
settlement was jealous of his own isolation and independence 
among his felloAV-settlers, so each settlement Avas jealous of its 
independence among its fellow-settlements. Each little farmer- 
commonwealth Avas girt in by its own border or " mark," a belt 
of forest or Avaste or fen Avhich parted it from its fellow-villages, 
a ring of common ground Avhieh none of its settlers might take for 
liis own, but Avhich served as a death-ground Avhere criminals met 
their doom, and AA'as held to be the special dwelling-place of the 
nixie and the Avill-o'-the-Avisp. If a stranger came through this 
wood or over this waste, custom bade him blow his horn as he 
came, for if he stole through secretly he Avas taken for a foe, and 
any man might lawfully slay him. Within the village Ave find 
from the first a marked social difference between two orders of its 
indAvellers. The bulk of its homesteads Avere those of its freemen 
or " ceorls ;" but among these Avere the larger homes of " eorls," 
or men distinguished among their felloAvs by noble blood, Avho 
Avere held in an hereditary reverence, and from Avhoni the " ealdor- 
men" of the village were chosen as leaders in Avar-time or rulers 
in time of peace. But the choice Avas a purely voluntary one, 
and the man of noble blood enjoyed no legal privilege above his 
fellows. The actual sovereignty Avithin the settlement resided 
in the body of its freemen. Their homesteads clustered round a 
moot-hill, or round a sacred tree, Avhere the Avhole community met 
to administer its own justice and to frame its OAvn laws. Here 
the field was passed from man to man by the delivery of a turf 
cut from its soil, and the strife of firmer Avith former Avas settled 
according to the "customs" of the settlement, as its "elder-men" 
stated them, and the wrong-doer Avas judged and his fine assessed 
by the kinsfolk. Here, too, the " Avitan," the Wise Men of the vil- 
lage, met to settle questions of peace and war, to judge just judg- 
ment, and frame Avise laAVS, as their descendants, the Wise Men 
of a later England, meet in Parliament at Westminster, to frame 



42 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH FEOPLE. 



[Chat. 



laws and do justice for the great empire which has sjDrung from 
this little body of farmer-commonwealths in Sleswick. 

The religion of the English was tlie same as that of the whole 
German family, Christianity, which had by this time brought 
about the conversion of the Roman Empire, had not j^enetrated 
as yet among the forests of the North. The common god of the 
English people, as of the whole German race, Avas Woden, the 
war-god, the guardian of ways and boundaries, to whom his wor- 
shipers attributed the invention of letters, and whom every tribe 
held to be the first ancestor of its kings. Our own names for the 
days of the week still recall to us the gods A\'hom our English 
fathers worshiped in their Sleswick homeland. Wednesday is 
Woden's-day, as Thursday is the day of Thunder, or, as the North- 
men called him, Thor, the god of air and storm and rain ; Friday 
is Frea's-day, the goddess of peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose 
emblems, borne aloft by dancing maidens, brought increase to 
every field and stall they visited. Saturday commemorates an 
obscure god, Soetere ; Tuesday the Dark god, Tiw, to meet whom 
was death. Eostre, the goddess of the dawn, or of the spring, 
lends her name to the Christian festival of the Resurrection. Be- 
hind these floated the dim shapes of an older mythology, " Wyrd," 
the death-goddess, whose memory lingered long in the " weird" of 
northern superstition, or the Shield-Maidens, the "mighty women" 
who, an old rhyme tells us, " wrought on the battle-field their toll 
and hurled the shrilling javelins." Nearer to the popular fancy 
lay the deities of wood and fell, or the hero-gods of legend and 
song, "Nicor" the water-sprite who gave us our water-nixies and 
"Old Nick," "Weland" the forger of mighty shields and sharp- 
biting swords at a later time in his Berkshire "■ Weyland's smithy," 
or JEgil, the hero -archer, whose legend is that of Cloudesly or 
Tell. A nature worship of this sort lent itself ill to the purjDOses 
of a priesthood, and though a priestly class existed it seems at no 
time to have had much weight in the English society. As every 
freeman was his own judge and his own legislator, so he was his 
own house priest; and the common English worship lay in the 
sacrifice which he offered to the god of his hearth. 

From Sleswick and the shores of the Northern Sea we must 
pass, before opening our story, to a land which, dear as it is now 
to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by English fee^. 
The island of Britain had for nearly four hundred years been a 
province of the Empire. A descent of Julius CsBsar revealed it 
(b.c. 55) to the Roman world, but nearly a century elapsed before 
the Emperor Claudius attempted its definite conquest. The vic- 
tories of Julius Agricola (a.d. 78-84) carried the Roman frontier 
to the Friths of Forth and of Clyde, and the work of Roman civ- 
ilization followed hard upon the Roman sword. The conquered 
population was grouped in great cities such as York or Lincoln, 
cities governed by their own municipal officers, guarded by mass- 
ive walls, and linked together by a net- work of magnificent roads, 
which extended from one end of the island to the other. Com- 
merce sprang up in ports like that of London ; agriculture flour- 



I-] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607-1013. 



43 



ished till Britain became one of the great corn -exporting coun- 
tries of the world ; its mineral resources were explored in the tin 
mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of Somerset, the iron mines of 
Northumberland and the Forest of Dean. The wealth of the isl- 
and grew fast during centuries of unbroken peace, but the evils 
which were slowly sapping the strength of the Roman Empire at 
large must have told heavily on the real wealth of the province 
of Britain. Here, as in Italy or Gaul, the population probably 
declined as the estates of the landed proprietors grew larger, and 
the cultivators sank into serfs whose cabins clustered round the 
luxurious villas of their lords. The mines, if worked by forced 
labor, must have been a source of endless oppression. Town and 
country Avere alike crushed by heavy taxation, while industry was 
checked by a system of trade guilds which confined each occu- 
pation to an hereditary caste. Above all, the purely despotic 
system of the Roman Government, by crushing all local hidepend- 
ence, crushed all local vigor. Men forgot how to fight for their 
country when they forgot how to govern it. 

Such causes of decay were common to every province of the 
Empire ; but there were others that sprang from the peculiar cir- 
cumstances of Britain itself. The island was weakened by a dis- 
union within, which arose from the partial character of its civili- 
zation. It was only in the towns that the conquered Britons be- 
came entirely Romanized. The tribes of the rural districts seem 
to have remained apart, s]3eaking their own tongue, and owning 
some traditional allegiance to their native chiefs. The use of the 
Roman language may be taken as marking the progress of Ro- 
man civilization, and though Latin had wholly superseded the lan- 
guage of the conquered peoples in Spain or Gaul, its use seems 
to have been confined in Britain to the inhabitants of the towns. 
It was this disunion that was revealed by the peculiar nature of 
the danger which threatened Britain from the North. The Picts 
were simply Britons who had been sheltered from Roman con-, 
quest by the fastnesses of the Highlands, and who were at last 
roused in their turn to attack by the weakness of the province 
and the hope of plunder. Their invasions penetrated to the heart 
of the island. ■ Raids so extensive could hardly have been eftect- 
ed without help from within, and the dim history of the time al- 
lows us to see not merely an increase of disunion betAveen the Ro- 
manized and un-Romanized population of Britain, but even an 
alliance between the last and their free kinsfolk, the Picts. The 
struggles of Britain, however, lingered on till dangers nearer 
home forced the Empire to recall its legions and leave the prov- 
ince to itself. Ever since the birth of Christ the countries which 
lay round the Mediterranean Sea, and which then comprehended 
the whole of the civilized world, had rested in peace beneath the 
rule of Rome. During four hundred years its frontier had held 
at bay the barbarian world without — the Parthian of the Eu- 
phrates, the Numidian of the African desert, the German of the 
Danube or tlie Rhine. It was this mass of savage barbarism that 
at last broke in on the Empire at a time when its force was 



44 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



sapped by internal decay. In the Western dominions of Rome 
the triumph of the invaders was complete. The Franks conquer- 
ed and colonized Gaul, the West-Goths conquered and colonized 
Spain, the Vandals founded a kingdom in Africa, the Burgundians 
encamped in the border-land between Italy and the Khone, the 
East-Goths ruled at last in Italy itself 

It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in 411 re- 
called her legions from Britain, and though she purposed to send 
them back again when the danger was over, the moment for their 
return never came. The province, thus left unaided, seems to 
have fought bravely against its assailants, and once at least to 
have driven back the Picts to their mountains in a rising of de- 
spair. But the threat of fresh inroads found Britain torn with 
civil quarrels which made a united resistance impossible, while its 
Pictish enemies strengthened themselves by a league with ma- 
rauders from Ireland (Scots as they were then called), whose pi- 
rate-boats were harrying the western coast of the island, and with 
a yet more formidable race of pirates who had long been pillaging 
along the British Channel. These were the English. We do not 
know whether it was the pressure of other tribes or the example 
of their German brethren who were now moving in a general at- 
tack on the Empire from their forest homes, or simply the barren- 
ness of their coast, which drove the hunters, farmers, fishermen, 
of the three English tribes to sea. But the daring spirit of their 
race already broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of their 
swoop, in the fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with 
which they seized either sword or oar. "Foes are they," sang a 
Roman poet of the time, " fierce beyond other foes, and cunning as 
they are fierce : the sea is their school of war, and the storm their 
friend; they are sea-wolves that live on the pillage of the world." 
To meet the league of Pict, Scot, and Englishman by the forces 
of the province itself became impossible ; and the one course left 
was to imitate the fatal policy by which the Empire had invited 
its own doom while striving to avert it, the policy of matching 
barbarian against barbarian. The rulers of Britain resolved to 
break the league by detaching the English from it, and to use 
their new allies against the Pict. By the usual promises of land 
and pay, a band of English warriors were drawn for this purpose 
in 449 from Jutland, with their chiefs, Hengest and Ilorsa, at their 
bead. 



Section II.— The £nglisli Conquest, 449—607. 

[Authorities for the Conquest of Britain. — The only extant British account is that 
of the monk Gildas, diffuse and inflated, but valuable as the one authority for the 
slate of the island at the tima, and as giving, in the conclusion of his work, the na- 
tive stoiy of the conquest of Kent. I have examined his general character, and the 
objections to his authenticity, etc., in two papers in the Saturday/ Review for April 
24 and May 8, 18G9. The conquest of Kent is the only one of which we have any 
record from the side of the conquered. The English conquerors have left brief jot- 
tings of the conquest of Kent, Sussex, and Wessex, in the curious annals which form 
the opening of the compilation now known as the "English Chronicle." They are 



I-] 



TEE ENGLISE KINGDOMS, 607-1013. 



45 



undoubtedly historic, though with a slight mythical intermixture. We possess no 
materials for the history of the English in their invasion of Mid-Britain or Mercia, 
and a fragment of the annals of Northumbria embodied in the later compilation which 
bears the name of Nennius alone throws light upon their actions in the Nortli. Dr. 
Guest's papers in the "Transactions of the Archisological Institute" are the best 
modern narratives of the conquest.] 



It is with the landing of Ilengest and his war-band at Ebbs- 
fleet on the shores of the Isle of Thanet that English history be- 
gins. No spot in Britain can be so sacred to Englishmen as that 
which first felt the tread of English feet. There is little indeed 
to catch the eye in Ebbsfleet itself, a mere lift of higher ground 
with a few gray cottages dotted over it, cut off nowadays from 
the sea by a reclaimed meadow and a sea-wall. But taken as a 
whole the scene has a wild beauty of its own. To the right the 
white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the crescent of 
Pegwell Bay ; far away to the left, across gray marsh levels, 
where smoke-wreaths mark the sites of Kichborough and Sand- 
wich, rises the dim cliff-line of Deal. Every thing in the char- 
acter of the spot confirms the national tradition which fixed here 
the first landing -jjlace of our English fathers, for great as the 
physical changes of the country have been since the fifth century, 
they have told little on its main features. It is easy to discover 
in the misty level of the present Minster Marsh Avhat was once a 
broad inlet of sea pai-ting Thanet from the main-land of Britain, 
through which the pirate-boats of the first Englishmen came sail- 
ing with a fair wind to the little gravel-spit of Ebbsfleet ; and 
Richborough, a fortress whose broken ramparts still rise above 
the gray flats which have taken the place of this older sea-chan- 
nel, was the common landing-place of travelers from Gaul. If the 
wai'-ships of the English pirates, therefore, were cruising off the 
coast at the moment when the bargain with the Britons was 
concluded, their disembarkation at Ebbsfleet almost beneath the 
walls of Richborough would be natural enough. But the after- 
current of events serves to show that the choice of this landing- 
place was the result of a deliberate design. Between the Briton 
and his hireling soldiers there could be little mutual confidence. 
Quarters in Thanet would satisfy the followers of Hengest, w^ho 
still lay in sight of their fellow-pirates in the Channel, and who 
felt themselves secured against the treachery which had so often 
proved fatal to the barbarian by the broad inlet which parted 
their. camp from the main-land. Nor was the choice less satisfac- 
tory to the provincial, trembling — and, as the event proved, just- 
ly trembling — lest in his zeal against the Pict he had introduced 
an even fiercer foe into Britain. His dangerous allies were coop- 
ed up in a corner of the land, and parted from it by a sea-channel 
which was guarded by the strongest fortresses of the coast. 

The need of such precautions Avas soon seen in the disputes 
which ai'ose as soon as the work for which the mercenaries had 
been hired was done The Picts were hardly scattered to the 
winds in a great battle when danger came from the Eno-Hsh them- 



46 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



selves. Their numbers rapidly increased as the news of the set- 
tlement spread among the pirates of the Channel, and with the 
increase of their number increased the difficulty of supplying 
i-ations and pay. The long dispute whicli rose ov^er these ques- 
tions was at last closed by the English with a threat of war. The 
threat, however, as we have seen, was no easy one to carry out. 
When the English chieftains gave their voice for war, in 449, the 
inlet between Thanet and the main-land, traversable only at low 
water by a long and dangerous ford, and guarded at either mouth 
by the fortresses of Richborougli and Reculver, stretched right 
across their patli. The channels of the Medway and the Cray, 
with the great circle of the Weald, furnished further lines of de- 
fense in the rear, while around lay a population of soldiers, the 
military colonists of tlie coast, pledged by terms of feudal service 
to guard the shore against the barbarian. Great, however, as these 
difficulties were, they yielded before the suddenness of Hengest's 
onset. The harbor seems to have been crossed, the coast-road to 
London seized, before any force could be collected to oppose the 
English ; and it was only when they jaassed the vast potteries 
whose refuse still strews the mud-banks of the Medway that the)'" 
found the river passage secured. The guarded walls of Rochester 
probably forced them to turn southward along the ridge of low 
hills which forms the bound of its river-valley. Their march led 
them through a district full of memories of a past which had evjen 
then faded from the minds of men ; for hill and hill-slope were 
the necropolis of a vanished race, and scattered among the boul- 
ders that strewed the ground rose the cromlechs and huge bar- 
rows of the dead. One such mighty relic survives in the mon- 
ument now called Kits's Coty House, the close as it seems of a 
great sepulchral avenue which linked the graves around it with 
the grave-ground of Addington. The view of their first battle- 
field broke on the English warriors from a steep knoll on which 
the gray weather-beaten stones of this monument are reared, and 
a lane which still leads down from it through peaceful homesteads 
guided them across the river-valley to a little village named 
Aylesford, which marked the ford across the Medway, The 
chronicle of the conquest tells nothing of the rush that must have 
carried the ford, or of the fight that went struggling up through 
the village. It tells only that Horsa fell in the moment of vic- 
tory ; and the flint-heaj) of Horsted, which has long preserved his 
name, and was held in after-time to mark his grave, is tlius the 
earliest of those monuments of English valor of which Westmin- 
ster is the last and noblest shrine. 

The victory of Aylesford did more than give East Kent to the 
English ; it struck the key-note of the whole English conquest 
of Britain. The massacre which followed the battle indicated 
at once the merciless nature of the struggle which had begun. 
While the wealthier Kentish land-owners fled in panic over sea, the 
poorer Britons took refuge in hill and forest till hunger drove them 
from their lurking-places to be cut down or enslaved by their con- 
querors. It was in vain that some sought shelter within the walls 



I-] 



TRE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607-1013. 



47 



of their churches; for the rage of the English seems to have burn- 
ed fiercest against the clergy. The priests were slain at the altar, 
the churches fired, the peasants driven by the flames to fling them- 
selves on a ring of pitiless steel. It is a picture such as this which 
distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of the other prov- 
inces of Rome. The conquest of Gaul by the Frank, or of Italy by 
the Lombard, proved little more than a forcible settlement of the 
one conqueror or the other among tributary subjects who were 
destined in a long course of ages to absorb their conquerors. 
French is the tongue not of the Frank but of the Gaul -vvhom he 
overcame; and the fair hair of the Lombard is now all but un- 
known in Lombardy. But the English conquest was a sheer dis- 
possession and slaughter of the people whom the English conquered. 
In all the world-wide struggle between Rome and the German 
invaders no land was so stubbornly fought for or so hardly won. 
The conquest of Britain was indeed only partly wrought out after 
two centuries of bitter warfare. But it was just through the long 
and merciless nature of the struggle that of all the German con- 
quests this proved the most thorough and complete. At its close 
Britain had become England, a land that is, not of Britons, but of 
Englishmen. It is possible that a few of the vanquished people 
may have lingered as slaves round the homesteads of their En- 
glish conquerors, and a few of their household words (if these Avere 
not brought in at a later time) mingled oddly with the Englisli 
tongue. But doubtful exceptions such as these leave the main 
facts untouched. When the steady progress of English conquest 
was stayed for a while by civil wars of a century and a half after 
Aylesford,the Briton had disappeared from the greater part of the 
land which had been his own, and the tongue, the religion, the 
laws of his English conqueror reigned without a rival from Essex 
to the Severn, and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth. 
Aylesford, however, was but the first step in this career of con- 
quest. How stubborn the contest was may be seen from the fact 
that it took sixty years to complete the conquest of Southern Brit- 
ain alone. Kent passed slowly under the rule of Hengest. After 
a second defeat at the passage of the Cray, the Britons " forsook 
Kent-land and fled with much fear to London;" and, six years 
after Aylesford, the castles of the shore, Richborough, Dover, and 
Lymne, fell at last into English hands. But the greed of plun- 
der drew fresh war-bands from the German coast. New invaders, 
drawn from among the Saxons, the southern tribe of the English 
confederacy, were seen in 477, some twenty years later, pushing 
slowly along the strip of land which lay westward of Kent between 
the Weald and the sea. Nowhere has the physical aspect of the 
country been more utterly changed. The vast sheet of scrub, 
wood-land, and waste which then bore the name of the Andreds- 
wold stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of 
Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the 
Thames, and leaving only a thin strip of coast along its southern 
edge. This coast was guarded by a great fortress, Avhich occupied 
the spot now called Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Nor- 



48 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



man Conqueror. The fall of this fortress of Anderida in 491 es- 
tablished the kingdom of the South-Saxons ; "^lle and Cissa," ran 
the pitiless record of the conquerors, " beset Anderida, and slew all 
that were therein, nor was there afterward one Briton left." But 
the followers of Hengest or of JEUa had touched little more than 
the coast; and the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved 
for a fresh band of Saxons, who struggled under Cerdic and Cym- 
ric up from Southampton Water in 495 to the great downs where 
Winchester offered so rich a prize. Five thousand Britons fell in 
a fight which opened the countiy to these invaders, and a fresh 
victory at Charford in 519 set the crown of the West-Saxons on the 
head of Cerdic. 

We know little of the incidents of these conquests ; nor do we 
know why at this juncture they seem to have been suddenly inter- 
rupted. But it is certain that a victory of the Britons at Mount 
Badon in the year 520 not only checked the progress of the West- 
Saxons, but was followed by a general pause in the English ad- 
vance. For nearly half a century the great belt of woodland 
which then cuiwed round from Dorset to the valley of the Thames 
seems to have barred the way of the assailants. From London to 
the Firth of Forth, from the Fens to St. David's Head, the coun- 
try still remained unconquered, and there was little in the long 
breathing-space to herald that second outbreak of the English 
race which really made Britain England. In the silence of llcis 
interval of rest we listen to the monotonous plaint of Gildas, the 
one writer whom Britain has left us, with a sti'ange disappoint- 
ment. Gildas had seen the English invasion, and it is to him we 
owe our knowledge of the English Conquest of Kent. But we 
look in vain to his book for any account of the life or settlement 
of the English conquerors. Across the border of the new En- 
gland that was growing up along the southern shores of Britain, 
Gildas gives us but a glimpse — doubtless he had but a glimpse 
himself — of forsaken walls, of shrines polluted by heathen impiety. 
His silence and his ignorance mark the character of the struggle. 
No British neck had as yet bowed before the English invader, no 
British pen was to record his conquest. A century after their 
landing the English are still known to their British foes only as 
"barbarians," " wolves," " dogs," " whelps from the kennel of bar- 
barism," " hateful to God and man." Their victories seemed vic- 
tories of the powers of evil, chastisements of a divine justice for 
national sin. Their ravage, terrible as it had been, was held to 
be almost at an end ; in another century — so ran old prophecies — 
their last hold on the land would be shaken off. But of submis- 
sion to, or even of intercourse with the strangers, there is not a 
word. Gildas tells us nothing of their fortunes, or of their leaders. 

In spite of his silence, however, we may still know something 
of the way in which the new English society grew up in the con- 
quered country, for the extermination of the Briton was but the 
prelude to the settlement of his conqueror. What strikes us at 
once in the new England is, that it was the one purely German 
nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in 



I] 



'-DOMS, 607-1013. 



49 



Spain, or Gaui, or i^aiy, tliough they were equally conquered by 
German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still re- 
mained Roman. In Britain alone Rome died into a vague tradi- 
tion of the past. The whole organization of government and so- 
ciety disappeared with the people who used it. The villas, the 
mosaics, the coins which we dig up in our fields are no relics of 
our English fathers, but of a Roman world which our fathers' 
sword swept utterly away. Its law, its literature, its manners, its 
faith, went with it. The new England was a heathen country. 
The religion of Woden and Thunder triumphed over the religion 
of Christ. Alone among the German assailants of Rome, the En- 
glish rejected the faith of the Empire they helped to overthrow. 
Elsewhere the Christian priesthood served 'as mediators between 
the barbarian and the conquered. Here the rage of the conquer- 
ors burned fiercest against the clergy. River and homestead and 
boundar}^, the very days of the week, bore the names of the new 
gods who displaced Christ. But if England seemed for the mo- 
ment a waste from which all the civilization of the world had fled 
away, it contained within itself the germs of a nobler life than 
that which had been destroyed. The base of the new English so- 
ciety was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or sac- 
rificing for himself in his far-off fatherland by the Northern Sea, 
However roughly he dealt while the struggle went on with the 
material civilization of Britain, it was impossible that such a man 
could be a mere destroyer. War was no sooner over than the 
warrior settled down into the farmer, and the home of the peas- 
ant churl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted stones that mark- 
ed the site of the villa he had burned. The English kinsfolk set- 
tled in groups over the conquered country, as the lot fell to each, 
no longer kinsfolk only but dwellers in the same plot, knit togeth- 
er by their common holding within the same bounds. Each lit- 
tle village -commonwealth lived the same life in Britain as its 
farmers had lived at home. Each had its moot-hill or sacred tree 
as a centre, its "mark" as a border; each judged by witness of 
the kinsfolk, and made laws in the assembly of its Avise men, sand 
chose its own leaders among the " eorls" for peace or Avar. 

In two ways only was this primitive organization of English 
society affected by its transfer to the soil of Britain, War begat 
the King. It is probable that the English had hitherto known 
nothing of kings in their own fatherland, where each small tribe 
lived under the rule of its own chosen ealdorman. But in a war 
such as that which they waged against the Britons it was neces- 
sary to find a common leader whom the various tribes engaged in 
conquei'ing Kent or Wessex might follow, and such a leader soon 
rose into a higher position than that of a temporary chief. The 
sons of Hengest became kings in Kent, those of JElla in Sussex. 
The West-Saxons have left a record of the solemn election by 
which they chose Cerdic for their king. Such a choice at once 
drew the va=rious villages and tribes of each community closer to- 
gether than of old, Avhile the usage which gave all unoccupied or 
common ground to the new ruler enabled him to surround him- 



50 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sko. II. 

. Tub 
Engi-isu 
Conquest. 

449-607. 



The 

Second 

Knglisli 

Atlvance. 



self with a chosen war-band of companions, servants, or " thegns" 
as they were called, who were rewarded for their service by gifts 
from it, and who at last became a nobility which superseded the 
"eorls" of the original English constitution. And as war begat 
the King and the military noble, so it all but begat the slave. 
There had alwaj^s been a slave class, a class of the unfree, among 
the English as among all German peoples ; but the numbers of 
this class, if unaffected by the conquest of Britain, were swelled 
by the wars which soon sprang up among the English conquerors. 
No rank saved the prisoner taken in battle from the doom of slav- 
ery, and slavery itself was often welcomed as saving the prisoner 
from death. We see this in the story of a noble warrior who had 
fallen wounded in a fight between two English tribes, and was 
carried as a bond-slave to the house of a thegn hard by. He de- 
clared himself a peasant, but his master penetrated the disguise. 
" You deserve death," he said, " since all my brothers and kins- 
folk fell in the fight," but for his oath's sake he spared liis life and 
sold him to a Frisian at London. The Frisian was probably a 
merchant, such as those who were carrying English captives at 
that time to the market-place of Rome. But war was not the 
only cause of the increase of this slave class. The number of the 
"unfree" were swelled by debt and crime. Famine drove men 
to " bend their heads in the evil days for meat ;" the debtor un- 
able to discharge his debt flung on the ground the freeman's 
sword and spear, took up the laborer's mattock, and placed his 
head as a slave within a master's hands. The criminal whose 
kinsfolk would not make up his fine became the crime-serf of the 
plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a father, pressed by need, sold 
children and wife into bondage. The slave became part of the 
live stock of the estate, to be willed away at death with the horse 
or the ass, whose pedigree was kept as carefully as his own. His 
children were bondsmen like himself; even the freeman's children 
by a slave-mother inherited the mother's taint. "Mine is the calf 
that is born of my cow," ran the English proverb. The cabins of 
the unfree clustered round the home of the freeman as they had 
clustered round the villa of the Roman gentleman ; plow-man, 
shepherd, goat-herd, swine-herd, ox-herd and cow-herd, dairy-maid, 
barnman, sow;er, hayward and woodward, were alike serfs. It 
was not such a slavery as that we have known in modern times, 
for stripes and bonds were rare ; if the slave were slain, it was by 
an angry blow,. not by the lash. But his lord could slay him if 
he Avould ; it was but a chattel the less. The slave had no place 
in the justice-court, no kinsman to claim vengeance for the wrong. 
If a stranger slew him, his lord claimed the damages; if guilty of 
wrong-doing, " his skin paid for him" under the lash. If he fled 
he might be chased like a strayed beast, and flogged to death for 
his crime, or burned to death if the slave were a woman. 

The halt of the English conquerors after the battle of Mount 
Badon was no very long one, for even while Gildas was writing, 
the Britons seem to have been driven from the eastern coast by a 
series of descents whose history is lost. The invaders who thus 



I-] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607-1013. 



51 



became masters of the Wolds of Lincolnshire, and of the great dis- 
trict which was cut off from the rest of Britain by the Wash and 
the Fens, were drawn from that tribe of the English confederacy 
which, as we have seen, bore especially the name of Englishmen, 
as those of South Britain had been drawn from its Saxon tribe, 
and those of Kent from its Jutish. On the Wolds they were 
known as Lindiswaras, in the Fens as Gyrwas; on the coast as 
North-folk and South-folk, names still preserved to us in the coun- 
ties where they settled. The district round London, on the other 
hand, was won and colonized by men of Saxon blood — the Middle- 
Sexe and East-Sexe or Essex. It may have been the success of 
these landings on the eastern coast that roused the West-Saxons 
of the southern coast to a new advance. Their capture of the 
hill-fort of Old Sarum in 552 threw open the reaches of the Wilt- 
shire Downs ; and pushing along the upper valley of Avon to a 
new battle at Barbury Hill, they swooped at last from their up- 
lands on the rich prey that lay along the Severn. Gloucester, 
Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued under their Brit- 
ish kings to resist this onset, became the spoil of an English vic- 
tory at Deorham in 557, and the line of the great western river 
lay open to the arms of the conquerors. Once the West-Saxons 
penetrated to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town be- 
side the Wrekin, recently brought again to light, went up in 
flames. A British poet sings piteously the death-song of Urico- 
nium, " the white town in the valley," the town of white stone 
gleaming among the green woodland, the hall of its chieftain left 
" without fire, without light, without songs," the silence broken 
only by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has swallowed fresh 
drink, heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair." The raid, however, 
was repulsed ; and the West-Saxons, who seem to have been 
turned to the east by the difficulty of forcing the fastnesses of the 
forest of Arden, penetrated into the valley of the Thames. A 
march of their King Cuthwulf's made them masters in 571 of the 
districts which now form Oxfordshire and Berkshire ; and their 
advance along the river upon London promised them the foremost 
place among the conquerors of Britain, But though Wessex was 
fated in the end to win overlordship over every English people, 
its time had not come yet ; and the leadership of the English race 
was to fall for nearly a century into the hands of a tribe of in- 
vaders whose fortunes we have now to follow. 

Rivers were the natural inlets by which the ISTorthern pirates 
every where made their way into the heart of Europe, In Brit- 
ain the fortress of London barred their way along the Thames 
from its mouth, antl drove them, as we have seen, to an advance 
along the southern coast and over the downs of Wiltshire, before 
reaching its upper waters. But the rivers which united in the 
estuary of the Humber led like open highways into the heart of 
Britain, and it was by this inlet that the great mass of the invad- 
ers penetrated into the interior of the island. Like the invaders 
of the eastern coast, they were of the English tribe from Sleswick. 
One body, turned southward by the forest of Elmet, which cov- 



52 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



The 
English 

conqtjest. 

449-607. 



ered the district around Leeds, followed the course of the Trent. 
Those who occupied the wooded country between the Trent and 
the Humber took, from their position, the name of Southumbrians. 
A second division, advancing along the curve of the former river, 
and creeping down the line of its tributary, the Soar, till they 
reached Leicester, became known as the Middle -English. The 
head waters of the Trent were the seat of those invaders who pen- 
etrated farthest to the west, and camped I'ouud Lichfield and Rep- 
ton. This country became the border-land between Englishmen 
and Britons, and the settlers bore the name of " Mercians," men, 
that is, of the March or border. We know hardly any thing of 
this conquest of Mid-Britain, and little more of the conquest of 
the North. Under the Romans political power had centred in 
the vast district between the Humber and the Forth. York had 
been the capital of Britain and the seat of the Roman prefect : 
and the balk of the garrison maintained in the island lay can- 
toned along the Roman wall. Signs of wealth and prosperity ap- 
peared every where : cities rose beneath the shelter of the Roman 
camps; villas of British land-owners studded the vale of the Ouse 
and the far-off uplands of the Tweed, where the shepherd trusted 
for security against Pictish marauders to the terror of the Roman 
name. This district was assailed at once from the north and 
from the south. A part of the invading force which entered the 
Humber marched over the Yorkshire Wolds to found a kingdopi, 
which was known as that of the Deiri, in the fens of Holderness 
and on the chalk downs westward of York. Ida and the men of 
fifty keels Avhich followed him reared, in 547, the capital of a more 
northerly kingdom, that of Bernicia, on the rock of Bamborougb, 
and won their way slowly along the coast against a stubborn re- 
sistance which formed the theme of British songs. 

Strife between these two kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia long 
hindered the full conquest of Northern Britain. They were at 
last united under ^thelfrith, a king of greater vigor than any we 
have seen yet in English history, and from their union was form- 
ed a new kingdom, the kingdom of Northumbria. Under ^thel- 
frith the work of conquest went on with wonderful rapidity. In 
603 the forces of the Northern Britons wei'e annihilated in a great 
battle at Daegsastan, and the rule of Northumbria established 
from the Humber to the Forth. Along the west of Britain there 
stretched the unconquered kingdoms of Strathclyde and Cum- 
bria, which extended from the river Clyde to the Dee, and the 
smaller British states which occupied Avhat we now call Wales. 
Chester formed the link between these two bodies: and it was 
Chester that ^thelfrith chose in 607 for his next point of attack. 
Hard by the city two thousand monks wei'e gathered in the mon- 
astery of Bangor, and after imploring in a three days' fast the 
help of Heaven for their country, a crowd of these ascetics fol- 
lowed the British army to the field, ^thelfrith watched the wild 
gestures and outstretched arms of the strange company as it 
stood apart, intent upon prayei-, and took the monks for enchant- 
ers. " Bear they arms or no," said the king, " they war against 



i] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607-1013. 



53 



us when they cry against us to their God," and in the surprise and 
rout which followed the monks were the first to fall. 



Section III.— The Northumbrian Kingdom, 607—685. 

[Authorities. — Bseda's " Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum" is the one pri- 
mary authority for this period. I have spoken fully of it and its writer in the text. 
The meagre regnal and episcopal annals of the West-Saxons have been brought by 
copious insertions from Bfeda to the shape in which they at present appear in the 
"English Chronicle." The Poem of Cisdmon has been pubUshed by Mr. Thorpe, 
and copious summaries of it are given by Sharon Turner ("Hist, of Anglo-Saxons," 
vol. iii., cap. 3) and Mr. Morley ("English Writers," vol. i.). The life of Wilfrid 
by Eddi, and those of Cuthbert by Bseda and an earlier contemporary biographer, 
which are appended to Mr. Stevenson's edition of the "Historia Ecclesiastica," 
throw great light on the religious condition of the North. For Guthlac of Crow- 
land, see the "Acta Sanctorum" for April xi. For Theodore, and the English 
Church which he organized, see Kemble ("Saxons in England," vol. ii., cap. 8-10), 
and above all the invaluable remarks of Professor Stubbs in his Constitutional His- 
tory.] 

The British kingdoms were now utterly parted from one an- 
other. By their victory at Deorham the West-Saxons had cut 
off the Britons of Devon and Cornwall from the general body of 
their race. By his victory at Chester and the reduction of Lan- 
cashire which followed it, ^thelfrith broke this body again into 
two several parts. From this time, therefore, the character of the 
English conquest of Britain changes. It dies down into a war- 
fare against the separate British provinces — West Wales, North 
Wales, and Cumbria, as they were called. — which, though often 
interrupted, at last found its close in the victories of Edward the 
First. A far more important change was that which was seen 
in the attitude of the English conquerors from this time toward 
each other. Freed from the common pressure of the war against 
the Britons, their energies turned, to combats with one another, 
to a long struggle for overlordship which was to end in bringing 
about a real national unity. In this, struggle the lead was at 
once taken by I^orthumbria, which succeeded under vEthelfrith 
in establishing its overlordship, or claim to military supremacy 
and tribute, over the English tribes who were occupying Mid- 
Britain, the Southumbrians, Middle-English, and Mercians; and 
probably over the Lindiswaras of Lincolnshire. But a powerful 
rival appeared at this moment in Kent. The kingdom of the 
Jutes rose suddenly into greatness under a king called ^thel- 
berht, who established his supremacy over the Saxons of Middle- 
sex and Essex, as well as over the English of East-Anglia as far 
north as the Wash ; and drove back the West-Saxons, when, after 
an interval of civil feuds, they began again their advance along 
the Thames, and marched upon London. 

The inevitable struggle between Kent and Northumbria was 
averted by the sudden death of ..^thelfrith. Marching in 617 
against Roedwald, king of East-Anglia, who had sheltered Eadwine, 
an exile from the Northumbrian kingdom, he perished in a defeat 
at the river Idle. JEthelberht, on the other hand, showed less zeal 



54 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



for the widening of his overloi'dship than for a renewal of that in- 
tercourse of Britain with the Continent which had been broken off 
by the conquests of the English. His marriage with Bercta, the 
daughter of the Frankish king Charibert of Paris, created a fresh 
tie between Kent and Gauk But the union had far more impoi*- 
tant results than those of which -^thelberht may have dreamed. 
Bercta, like her Frankish kinsfolk, was a Christian. A Christian 
bishop accompanied her from Gaul to Canterbury, the royal city 
of the kingdom of Kent ; and a ruined Christian church, the 
Church of St. Martin, was given them for their worship. The 
marriage of Bercta was an opportunity which was at once seized 
by the bishop who at this time occupied the Roman See, and who 
is justly known as Gregory the Great. Years ago, when but a 
young deacon, Gregory had noted the white bodies, the fair faces, 
the golden hair of some youths who stood bound in the market- 
place of Rome. " From what country do these slaves come ?" he 
asked the traders who brought them. "They are English, An- 
gles !" the slave-dealers answei-ed. The deacon's pity veiled itself 
in poetic humor. "Not Angles, but angels," he said, "with faces 
so angel-like ! From what country come they ?" " They come," 
said the merchants, " from Deira." " De ira !" was the untranslat- 
able reply ; " aye, plucked from God's ire, and called to Christ's 
mercy ! And what is the name of their king ?" "^Ua," they told 
him ; and Gregory seized on the word as of good omen. "Alle- 
luia shall be sung there," he cried, and passed on, musing how the 
angel-faces should be brought to sing it. Years went by, and the 
deacon had become Bishop of Rome, when Bercta's marriage gave 
him the opening he sought. He at once sent a Roman abbot, Au- 
gustine, at the head of a band of monks, to preach the Gospel to 
the English people. Tlie missionaries landed in 597 on the very 
spot where Hengest had landed more than a century before in the 
Isle of Thanet ; and the king received them sitting in the open air, 
on the chalk-down above Minster, where the eye nowadays catches 
miles away over the marshes the dim tower of Canterbury. He 
listened to the long sermon as the interpreters whom Augustine 
had brought with him from Gaul translated it. "Your words are 
fair,"^thelberht replied at last, with English good sense, "but 
they are new and of doubtful meaning ;" for himself, he said, he 
refused to forsake the gods of his fathers, but he promised shelter 
and protection to the strangers. The band of monks entered Can- 
terbury bearing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, 
and singing in concert the strains of the litany of their Church. 
" Turn from this city, O Lord," they sang, " Thine anger and wrath, 
and turn it from Thy holy house, for w'e have sinned." And then 
in strange contrast came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrev/ 
worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnest- 
ness from the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market- 
place, "Alleluia !" 

It is strange that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hen- 
gest should be yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine, 
But the second landing at Ebbsfleet w^as in no small measure the 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



55 



reversal and undoing of the first. " Strangers from Rome" was 
the title with which the missionaries first fronted the English 
king. The march of the monks as they chanted their solemn lit- 
any was, in one sense, the return of the Roman legions who had 
retired at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue and 
the thought, not of Gregory only, but of such men as his English 
fathers had slaughtered and driven over sea, that ^thelberht list- 
ened in the preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, the earliest roy- 
al city of German England, became the centre of Latin influence. 
The Latin tongue became again one of the tongues of Britain, the 
language of its worship, its correspondence, its literature. If 
poetry began at a later day in the English epic of Cgedmon, prose 
took its first shape in the Latin history of Bseda, But more than 
the tongue of Rome returned with Augustine. Practically his 
landing renewed the union with the Western Avorld which that 
' of Hengest had destroyed. The new England was admitted into 
the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization, art, letters, 
. which had fled before the sword of the English Conquest, returned 
with the Christian faith. The great fabric of the Roman law, in- 
deed, never took root in England, but it is impossible not to recog- 
nize the result of the influence of the Roman missionaries in the 
fact that the codes of customary English law began to be put into 
writing soon after their arrival. 

As yet these great results were still distant ; a 3'ear passed be- 
fore even JEthelberht yielded, but from the moment of his con- 
version the new faith advanced rapidly. The Kentish men crowd- 
ed to baptism in the Swale ; the under-kings of Essex and East- 
Anglia received the creed of their overlord. A daughter of the 
Kentish king carried with her the missionary Paulinus to the 
Northumbrian court. Northumbria was now fast rising to a 
power which set all rivalry at defiance. Eadwine, whom we have 
seen an exile at Rsedwald's court, mounted the Northumbrian 
throne on the fall of his enemy, ^thelfrith, in 617; and asserted, 
like his predecessor, his lordship over the English of Mid-Britain. 
The submission of the East-Anglians and the East-Saxons after 
^thelberht's death destroyed all dread of opposition from Kent ; 
and the English conquerors of the south, the people of the West- 
Saxons, alone remained independent. But revolt and slaughter 
had fatally broken the power of the West-Saxons when the North- 
umbrians attacked them. A story preserved by Baeda tells some- 
thing of the fierceness of the struggle which ended in the subjec- 
tion of the south to the overlordship of Northumbria. Eadwine 
gave audience in an Easter-court, which he held in his royal city 
by the river Derwent, to Eumer, an envoy of Wessex, who brought 
a message from its king. In the midst of the conference the en- 
voy started to his feet, drew a dagger from his robe, and rushed 
madly on the Northumbrian sovereign. Lilla, one of the king's 
war-band, threw himself between Eadwine and his assassin; but 
so furious was the stroke, that even through Lilla's body the dag- 
ger still reached its aim. The king, however, recovered from his 
wound, to march on the West- Saxons: he slew and subdued all 



56 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



who had conspired against him, and returned victoi'ious to his 
own country. The greatness of Northumbria now reached its 
height. Within his own dominions, Eadwine displayed a genius 
for civil govei'nment which shows how completely the mere age 
of conquest had passed away. With him began the English prov- 
erb so often applied to after kings: "A woman with her babe 
might walk scatheless from sea to sea in Eadwine's day." Peace- 
ful communication revived along the deserted highways ; the 
springs by the roadside were marked with stakes, and a cup of 
brass set beside each for the traveler's refreshment. Some faint 
traditions of the Roman past may have flung their glory round 
this new " Empire of the English ;" some of its majesty had, at 
any rate, come back with its long-lost peace. A royal standard 
of purple and gold floated before Eadwine as he rode through the 
villages ; a feather-tuft attached to a spear, the Roman tufa, pre- 
ceded him as he walked through the streets. The Northumbrian 
king was in fact supreme over Britain as no king of English blood 
had been before. Northward his frontier reached the Forth, and 
was guarded by a city which bore his name, Edinburgh, Eadwine's 
burgh, the city of Eadwine. Westward, he was master of Ches- 
ter, and the fleet he equipped there subdued the isles of Anglesey 
and Man. South of the Huraber he was owned as overlord by 
the whole English race, save Kent : and Kent bound itself to him 
by giving him its king's daughter as a wife, a step which probk- 
bly marked political subordination. 

With the Kentish queen came PauHnus, one of Augustine's fol- 
lowers, whose tall stooping form, slender aquiline nose, and black 
hair falling round a thin, Avorn face, were long remembered in the 
North ; and the wise men of Northumbria gathered to deliberate 
on the new faith to which Paulinus and his queen soon converted 
Eadwine. To finer minds its charm lay in the light it threw on 
the darkness which encompassed men's lives, the darkness of the 
future as of the past. " So seems the life of man, O king," burst 
forth an aged Ealdorraan, " as a sparrow's flight through the hall 
when you are sitting at meat in winter-tide, with the warm fire 
lighted on the hearth, but the icy rain-storm without. The spar- 
row flies in at one door, and tarries for a moment in the light and 
heat of the hearth-fire, and then, flying forth from the other, van- 
ishes into the wintry dai'kness whence it came. So tarries foi a 
moment the life of man in our sight ; but what is before it, what 
after it, we know not. If this new teaching tells us aught cer- 
tainly of these, let us follow it." Coarser arguments told on the 
crowd. " None of your people, Eadwine, have worshiped the gods 
more busily than I," said Coiti the priest, " yet there are many 
more favored and more fortunate. Were these gods good for any 
thing they would help their worshipers." Then, leaping on horse- 
back, he hurled his spear into the sacred temple which gave its 
name to Godmanham on the Derwent, and with, the rest of the 
Witan embraced the religion of the king. 

But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not to fall without a 
struggle. Even in Kent a reaction against the new creed began 



I-] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



57 



with the death of JEthelberht. Rsedwald of East-Anglia resolved 
to serve Christ and the older gods together: and a pagan and 
Christian altar fronted one another in the same royal temple. 
The young kings of the East-Saxons bui'st into the church where 
Mellitus, the Bishop of London, was administering the Eucharist 
to the people, crying, " Give us that white bread you gave to our 
father Saba," and on the bishop's refusal drove him from their 
realm. The tide of reaction was checked for a time by Ead- 
wine's conversion ; until Mercia sprang into a sudden greatness 
as the champion of the heathen gods. Under ^thelfrith and 
Eadwine Mercia had submitted to the lordship of Northumbria; 
but its king, Penda, saw in the rally of the old religion a chance 
of winning back its independence. Alone, however, he was as yet 
no match for Northumbria, But the war of the English people 
with the Britons seems at this moment to have died down for a 
season, and Penda boldly broke through the barrier which had 
parted the two races till now, and allied himself with the Welsh 
king, Cadwallon, in an attack on Eadwine. The armies met in 
633 at Hatfield, and in the fight which followed Eadwine was de- 
feated and slain. The victory was at once turned to profit by the 
ambition of Penda, while Northumbria was torn with the strifes 
which followed Eadwine's fall. Penda united to his own Mer- 
cians of the Upper Trent the Middle English of Leicester, the 
Southumbrians, and the Lindiswaras : and was soon strong enough 
to tear from the West-Saxons their possessions along the Severn. 
So thoroughly was the union of these provinces effected, that 
though some were detached for a time after Penda's death, the 
name of Mercia from this moment must be generally taken as cov- 
ering the whole of them. But his work in Middle England gave 
Northumbria time to rise again under a new king, Oswald. The 
Welsh had remained encamped in the heart of the North, and 
Oswald's first fight was with Cadwallon. A small Northumbrian 
force gathered in 635 under their new king near the Roman Wall, 
and set up the Cross as their standard. Oswald held it with his 
own hands till the hollow in which it was to stand was filled in 
by his soldiers; then throwing himself on his knees, he cried to 
his army to pray to the living God. Cadwallon fell fighting on 
the " Heaven's Field," as after times called the field of battle, and 
for nine years the power of Oswald equaled that of ^thelfrith and 
Eadwine. 

It was not the Church of Paulinus which nerved Oswald to this 
struggle for the Cross. Paulinus had fled from Northumbria at 
Eadwine's fall ; and the Roman Church in Kent shrunk into in- 
activity before the heathen reaction. Its place in the conversion 
of England was taken by missionaries from Ireland. To under- 
stand, however, the true meaning of the change, we must i-emem- 
ber that before the landing of the English in Britain, the Christian 
Church comprised every country, save Germany, in Western Eu- 
rope, as far as Ireland itself The conquest of Britain by the pa- 
gan English thrust a wedge of heathendom into the heart of this 
great communion, and broke it into two unequal parts. On the 



58 



HISTOBT OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



one side lay Italy, Spain, and Gaul, whose churches owned obedi- 
ence to the See of Rome ; on the other the Church of Ireland. But 
the condition of the two portions of Western Christendom was 
very different. While the vigor of Christianity in Italy and Gaul 
and Spain was exhausted in a bare struggle for life, Ireland, which 
remained unscourged by invaders, drew from its conversion an 
energy such as it has never known since. Christianity had been 
received there with a burst of popular enthusiasm, and letters and 
arts sprung up rapidly in its train. The science and Biblical 
knowledge Avhich fled from the Continent took refuge in famous 
schools which made Durrow and Armagh the universities of the 
West. The new Christian life soon beat too strongly to brook 
confinement within the bounds of Ireland itself Patrick, the first 
missionary of the island, had not been half a century dead when 
Irish Christianity flung itself with a fiery zeal into battle with 
the mass of heathenism which was rolling in upon the Christian 
world. Irish missionaries labored among the Picts of the High- 
lands and among the Frisians of the northern seas. An Irish 
missionary, Columban, founded monasteries in Burgundy and the 
Apennines. The canton of St. Gall still commemorates in its 
name another Irish missionary before whom the spirits of flood 
and fell fled wailing over the waters of the Lake of Constance. 
For a time it seemed as if the course of the world's history was to 
be changed, as if the older Celtic race that Roman and German 
had swept before them had turned to the moral conquest of their 
conquerors, as if Celtic and not Latin Christianity was to mould 
the destinies of the Churches of the West. 

It was jDOSsibly the progress of the Irish Columban at her very 
doors which roused into new life for a time the energies of Rome, 
and spurred Gregory to attempt the conversion of the English in 
Britain. But, as we have seen, the ardor of the Roman mission in 
Kent soon sunk into reaction; and again the Church of Ireland 
came forward to supply its place. On a low island of barren 
gneiss-rock off the west coast of Scotland, another Irish refugee, 
Columba, had raised the famous monastery of lona. Oswald in 
youth found refuge within its walls, and on his accession to the 
throne of Northumbria he called for missionaries from among its 
monks. The first dispatched in answer to his call obtained little 
success. He declared on his return that among a people so stub- 
born and barbarous success was impossible. " Was it their stub- 
bornness, or your severity?" asked Aidan, a brother sitting by; 
" did you forget God's word to give them the milk first and then 
the meat?" All eyes turned on the speaker as fittest to under- 
take the abandoned mission, and Aidan sailing at their bidding 
fixed his episcopal see in the island -j^eninsula of Lindisfarne. 
Thence, from the monastery which gave to the spot its after name 
of Holy Island, preachers poured forth over the heathen realms. 
Chad went to tlie conversion of the Mercians, Boisil guided a lit- 
tle troop of missionaries to Melrose, Aidan himself wandered on 
foot, with the king as his interpreter, preaching among the peas- 
ants of Yorkshire and JS^orthumbria. The reception of the new 



I-] 



TEE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



59 



faith in the surrounding kingdoms became the mark of their sub- 
mission to Oswald's overlordship. A preacher from Gaul, Birinus, 
had already penetrated into pagan Wessex, and in Oswald's pres- 
ence its king received baptism, and established with his assent the 
see of Southern Britain in the royal city of Dorchester. Oswald 
ruled as wide a realm as his predecessor; but for after times the 
memory of his greatness was lost in the legends of his piety, A 
new conception of kingship began to blend itself with that of the 
warlike glory of ^thelfrith,or the wise administration of Ead- 
wine. Tlie moral power Avhich was to reach its height in Alfred 
first dawns in the story of Oswald. He wandered, as we have 
said, as Aidan's interpreter in his long mission journeys. "By 
reason of his constant habit of praying or giving thanks to the 
Lord, he was wont wherever he sat to hold his hands upturned on 
his knees." As he feasted with Bishop Aidan by his side, the 
thegn, or noble of his war-band, whom he had set to give alms to 
the poor at his gate, told him of a multitude that still waited fast- 
ing without. The king at once bade the untasted meat before 
him to be carried to the poor, and his silver dish be divided piece- 
meal among them. Aidan seized the royal hand and blessed it. 
" May this hand," he cried, " never grow old !" 

Prisoned, however, as it was by the conversion of Wessex to 
the central districts of England, heathendom fought desperately 
for life. Penda was still its rallying-point. His long reign in 
fact was one continuous battle with the Cross. We do not know 
why he looked idly on while Oswald re-asserted his overlordship 
over Wessex, but the submission of East-Anglia to the Northum- 
brian rule forced him to a fresh contest. East-Anglia had long 
before become Christian, but the oddly mingled religion of its first 
Christian king, Ra^dwald, died into mere superstition in his suc- 
cessors. Its present king, Sigebert, left his throne for a monas- 
tery before the war began, but his people dragged him again from 
his cell on the news of Penda's invasion, in faith that his presence 
would bring them the favor of Heaven. The monk-king was set 
in the fore-front of the battle, but he would bear no weapon but a 
wand, and his fall was followed by the rout of his army and the 
submission of his kingdom to the invader. In 642 Oswald marched 
to deliver East-Anglia from Penda ; but in a battle called the bat- 
tle of the Maserfeld he was overthrown and slain. His body was 
mutilated, and its limbs set on stakes by the brutal conqueror; 
but legend told that when all else of Oswald had perished, the 
" white hand" that Aidan had blessed still remained white and un- 
corrupted. For a few years after his victory at Maserfeld, Penda 
stood supreme in Britain. Wessex owned his overlordship as it 
had owned that of Oswald, and its king threw off" the Christian 
faith and married Penda's sister. IsTorthumbria alone, though dis- 
tracted by civil war between rival claimants for its throne, refused 
to yield. Year by year Penda carried his ravages over the ilorth; 
once he reached even the royal city,^he impregnable rock-fortress 
of Bamborough. Despairing of success in an assault, he pulled 
down the cottages around, an#:piling their wood against its walls, 



60 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



fired the mass in a fair wind that drove the flames on the town. 
" See, Lord, what ill Penda is doing," cried Aidan fron-^ his hermit 
cell in the islet of Fame, as he saw the smoke drifting over the 
city, and a change of wind — so ran the legend of Northumbria's 
agony — drove back at the words the flames on those who kindled 
them. But in spite of Penda's victories, the faith which he had 
so often struck down revived every where around him. Burned 
and harried as it was, Northumbria still fought for the Cross, 
Wessex quietly became Christian again, Penda's own son, whom 
he had set over the Middle-English, received bajDtism and teach- 
ers from Lindisfarne, At last the missionaries of the new faith 
appeared fearlessly among the Mercians themselves. Heathen to 
the last, Penda stood by unheeding if any were willing to hear; 
hating and despising with a certain grand sincerity of nature 
" those whom he saw not doing the works of the faith they had 
received," Northumbrian overlordship again followed in the track 
of Northumbrian missionaries along the eastern coast, and the 
old man roused himself for a last stroke at his foes, Oswi had at 
length been accepted as its sovereign by all Northumbria, and in 
655 he met the pagan host in the field of Winwced by Leeds. It 
was in vain that the Northumbrians sought to avert Penda's at- 
tack by offers of ornaments and costly gifts. "If the pagans will 
not accept them," Oswi cried at last, "let us offer them to One 
that will ;" and he vowed that if successful he would dedicate 
his daughter to God, and endow twelve monasteries in his realm. 
Victory at last declared for the faith of Christ, The river over* 
which the Mercians fled was swollen Avith a great rain ; it swept 
away the fragments of the heathen host, and the cause of the older 
gods was lost forever. 

The terrible struggle between heathendom and Christianity was 
followed by a long and profound peace. For three years after the 
battle of Winwced. Mercia was governed by Northumbrian thegns 
in Oswi's name; and though a general rising of the people threw 
off their yoke, and set Penda's son Wulfere on its throne, it still 
owned .the Northumbrian overlordship. Its heathendom Avas 
dead with Penda. "Being thus freed," B^eda tells us, "the Mer- 
cians with their king rejoiced to serve the true King, Christ." 
Its three provinces, the earlier Mercia, the Middle -English, and 
the Lindiswaras, were united in the bishopric of Ceadda, the St. 
Chad to whom Lichfield is still dedicated, Ceadda was a monk 
of Lindisfarne, so simple and lowly in temper that he traveled on 
foot on his long mission journeys, till Archbishop Theodore with 
his own hands lifted him on horseback. The old Celtic poetry 
breaks out in his death-legend, as it tells us how voices of sing- 
ers singing sweetly descended from heaven to the little cell beside 
St, Mary's Chui-ch where the bishop lay dying. Then "the same 
song ascended from the roof again, and returned heavenw^ard by 
the way that it came," It was the soul of his brother, the misj- 
sionary Cedd, come with a choir of angels to solace the last hours 
of Ceadda, In Northumbria the work of his fellow-missionaries 
has almost been- lost in the glory of Cuthbert. No story better 



I-] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



61 



lights up for us the new religious life of the time than the story 
of this apostle of the Lowlands. It carries us at its outset into 
northern JSTorthumbria, the older Bernicia, the country of the Te- 
viot and the Tweed. Born on the southern edge of the Lammer- 
moor, Cuthbert found shelter at eight years old in a widow's 
house in the little village of Wrangholni, Already in youth there 
was a poetic sensibility beneath the robust frame of the boy which 
caught even in the chance word of a game a call to higher things. 
Later on, a traveler coming in his white mantle over the hill-side, 
and stopping his horse to tend Cuthbert's injured knee, seemed to 
him an angel. The boy's shepherd life carried him to the bleak 
upland, still famous as a sheep-walk, though the scant herbage 
scarce veils the whinstone rock, and there meteors plunging into 
the night became to him a company of angelic spirits, carrying 
the soul of Bishop Aidan heavenward. Slowly Cuthbert's long- 
ings settled into a resolute will toward a religious life, and he 
made his way at last to a group of log-shanties in the midst of 
untilled solitudes, where a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had 
settled in the mission- station of Melrose. To-day the land is a 
land of poetry and romance. Cheviot and Lammermoor, Ettrick 
and Teviotdale, Yarrow and Annan-water, are musical with old 
ballads and border minstrelsy. Agriculture has chosen its val- 
leys for her favorite seat, and drainage and steam-power have 
turned sedgy marshes into farm and meadow. But to see the 
lowlands as they were in Cuthbert's day we must sweep meadow 
' and farm away again, and replace them by vast solitudes, dotted 
here and there with clustei's of wooden hovels, and crossed by 
boggy tracks, over which travelers rode spear in hand and eye 
kept cautiously about them. The Northumbrian peasantry among 
whom he journeyed were for the most part Christians only in 
name. With Teutonic indiiference, they yielded to their thegns 
in nominally accepting the new Christianity as these had yielded 
to the king. But they retained their old superstitions side by side 
with the new worship ; plague or mishap drove them back to a 
reliance on their heathen charms and amulets ; and if trouble be- 
fell the Christian preachers who came settling among them, they 
took it as proof of the wrath of the older gods. When some log- 
rafts which w^ere floating down the Tyne for the construction of 
an abbey at its mouth drifted with the monks who were at work 
on them out to sea, the rustic by-standers shouted, "Let nobody 
pray for them ; let nobody pity these men, who have taken away 
from us our old worship ; and how their new-fangled customs are 
to be kept nobody knows." On foot, on horseback, Cuthbert wan- 
dered among listeners such as these, choosing above all the re- 
moter mountain villages from whose roughness and poverty other 
teachers turned aside. Unlike his Irish comrades, he needed no 
interpreter as he passed from village to village ; the frugal, long- 
headed Northumbrians listened wiflingly to one who was himself 
a peasant of the Lowlands, and. who had caught the rough North- 
umbrian burr along the banks of the Leader. His patience, his 
humorous good sense, the sweetness of his look, told for him, and 



62 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



not less the stout, vigorous frame which fitted the peasant-preach- 
er for the hard life he had chosen, " Never did man die of hunger 
who served God faithfully," he would say, when night-fall found 
thera supperless in the Avaste. "Look at the eagle overhead! 
God can feed us through him if He will" — and once at least he 
owed his meal to a fish that the scared bird let fall. A snow- 
storm drove his boat on the coast of Fife. "The snow closes the 
road along the shore," mourned his comrades ; " the storm bars 
our way over sea." " There is still the way of heaven that lies 
open," said Cuthbert. 

While missionaries were thus laboring among its peasantry, 
Northumbria saw the rise of a host of monasteries, not bound in- 
deed by the strict ties of the Benedictine rule, but gathered on the 
loose Celtic model of the family or the clan round some noble and 
wealthy person who sought devotional retirement. 

The most notable and wealthy of these houses was that of Strc- 
onoshalh, w^here Hild, a Avoman of royal race, reared her abbey 
on the summit of the dark cliffs of Whitbj^, looking out over the 
ISTorthern Sea. Whitby became the Westminster of the North- 
umbrian kings; within its walls stood the tombs of Eadwine and 
of Oswi, with nobles and queens grouped around them. Hild was 
herself a Northumbrian Deborah, whose counsel was sought even 
by bishojjs and kings; and the double monastery over which she 
ruled became a seminary of bishops and priests. The sainted 
John of Beverley was among her scholars. But the name whicli 
really throws glory over Whitby is the name of a cowherd from 
whose lips during the reign of Oswi flowed the first great English 
song. Though well advanced in years, Csedmon had learned noth- 
ing of the art of verse, the alliterative jingle so common among 
his fellows, "wherefore being sometimes at feasts, when all agreed 
for glee's sake to sing in turn, he no sooner saw the harp come 
toward him than he rose from the board and turned homeward. 
Once when he had done thus, and gone from the feast to the sta- 
ble where he had that night charge of the cattle, there appeared 
to him in his sleep One who said, greeting him by name, ' Sing, 
Cgedmon, some song to Me.' 'I can not sing,' lie answered; 'for 
this cause left I the feast and came hither.' He who talked with 
him answered, ' However that be, you shall sing to Me,' ' What 
shall I sing ?' rejoined Caedmon, ' The beginning of created 
things,' replied He. In the morning the cowherd stood before 
Hild and told his dream. Abbess and brethren alike concluded 
'that heavenly grace had been conferred on him by the Lord,' 
They translated for Csedmon a passage in Ploly Writ, 'bidding 
him, if he could, put the same into verse,' The next morning he 
gave it them composed in excellent verse, whereon the abbess, un- 
derstanding the divine grace in the man, bade him quit the secu- 
lar habit and take on him the monastic life." Piece by piece the 
sacred story was thus thrown into Cnsdmon's poem. "Pie sang 
of the creation of the world, of the origin of man, and of all the 
history of Israel; of their departure from Egypt and entering into 
the Promised Land ;. of the incarnation, passion, and resurrection 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



63 



of Christ, and of His ascension; of the terror of future judgment, 
the horror of hell-pangs, and the joys of heaven." 

To men of that day this sudden burst of song seemed a thing 
necessarily divine. " Others after him strove to compose relig- 
ious poems, but none could vie with him, for he learned not the 
art of poetry from men, nor of men, but from God." It was not 
that any revolution had been wrought by Csedmon in the outer 
form of English song, as it had grown out of the stormy life of 
the pirates of the sea. The war- song still remained the true 
type of English verse, a verse without art or conscious develop- 
ment or the delight that springs from reflection, powerful with- 
out beauty, obscured by harsh metaphors and involved construc- 
tion, but eminently the verse of warriors, the brief passionate ex- 
pression of brief passionate emotions. Image after image, phrase 
after phrase, in these early poems, starts out vivid, harsh, and em- 
phatic. The very meter is rough with a sort of self-violence and 
repression ; the verses fall like sword-strokes in the thick of bat- 
tle. Hard toilers, fierce fighters, with huge appetites whether for 
meat or the ale-bowl, the one breath of poetry that quickened the 
animal life of the first Englishman was the poetry of war. But 
the faith of Christ brought in, as we have seen, new realms of 
fancy. The legends of the heavenly light, Bseda's story of "The 
Sparrow," show the side of English temperament to which Chris- 
tianity appealed — its sense of the vague, vast mystery of the 
world and of man, its dreamy revolt against the narrow bounds 
of experience and life. It was this new poetic world which com- 
bined with the old in the epic of Csedmon. In the song of the 
Whitby cowherd the vagueness and daring of the Teutonic im- 
agination float out beyond the limits of the Hebrew story to a 
"swart hell without light and full of flame," swept only at dawn 
by the icy east wind, on whose floor lie bound the apostate an- 
gels. The human energy of the German race, its sense of the 
might of individual manhood, transformed in Csedmon's verse the 
Plebrew Tempter into a rebel Satan, disdainful of vassalage to 
God. " I may be a God as He," Satan cries amidst his torments. 
"Evil it seems to me to cringe to Him for any good." Even in 
this terrible outburst of the fallen spirit, we catch the new pa- 
thetic note which the Northern melancholy was to give to our 
poetry. "This is to me the chief of sorrow, that Adam, wrought 
of earth, should hold my strong seat — should joy in our torment. 
Oh that for one winter's space I had power Avith my hands, then 
with this host I — but around me lie the iron bonds, and this chain 
galls me." On the other hand, the enthusiasm for the Christian 
God, faith in whom had been bought so dearly by years of des- 
perate struggle, breaks out in long rolls of sonorous epithets of 
praise and adoration. The temper of Csedmon brings him near to 
the earlier fire and passion of the Plebrew, as the history of his 
time brought him near to the old Bible history, with its fights 
and wanderings. "The wolves sing their horrid even-song; the 
fowls of war, greedy of battle, dewy-feathered, scream around the 
host of Pharaoh," as wolf howled and eagle screamed round the 



64 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



host of Penda. Every where Csedmon is a type of the new grand- 
eur, depth, and fervor of tone which the German race was to give 
to the religion of the East. 

But even while Csedmon was singing, the Christian Church of 
Northumbria was torn in two by a strife, whose issue was decided 
in the same abbey of Whitby where the cowherd dwelt. The la- 
bor of Aidan, the victories of Oswald and Oswi, seemed to have 
annexed England to the Irish Church. The monks of Lindisfarne, 
or of the new religious houses whose foundation followed that of 
Lindisfarne, looked for their ecclesiastical tradition, not to Rome, 
but to Ireland; and quoted for their guidance the instructions, 
not of Gregory, but of Columba. Whatever claims of supremacy 
over the whole English Church might be pressed by the see of 
Canterbury, the real metropolitan of the Church as it existed in 
the [Morth of England was the Abbot of lona. But liome was 
already moving to regain the ground she had lost, and her efforts 
were seconded by those of two men whose love of Rome mounted 
to a i^assionate fanaticism. The life of Wilfrith of York was a 
mere series of flights to Rome and returns to England, of wonder- 
ful successes in pleading the right of Rome to the obedience of 
the Church of Northumbria, and of as wonderful defeats. Bene- 
dict Biscop worked toward the same end in a quieter fashion, com- 
ing backward and forward across sea with books and relics and 
cunning masons and i:)ainters to rear a great church and monas- 
tery at Wearmouth, whose brethren owned obedience to the Ro- 
man See. The strife between the two parties rose so high at last 
that Oswi was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great council 
at Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical allegiance of England 
should be decided. The points actually contested were trivial 
enough. Colman, Aidan's successor at Holy Island, pleaded for 
the Irish fashion of the tonsure, and for the Irish time of keep- 
ing Easter: Wilfrith pleaded for the Roman. The one disputant 
appealed to the authority of Columba, the other to that of St. Pe- 
ter. "You own," cried the puzzled king at last to Colman, "that 
Christ gave to Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven — has He 
given such power to Columba ?" The Bishop could but answer 
"No." "Then will I rather obey the porter of heaven," said 
Oswi, " lest when I reach its gates he who has the keys in his 
keeping turn his back on me, and there be none to open." The 
importance of Oswi's judgment was never doubted at Lindisfarne, 
where Colman, followed by the whole of the Irish-born brethren, 
and thirty of their English fellows, forsook the see of St. Aidan, 
and sailed away to lona. Trivial, in fact, as were the actual 
points of difference which severed the Roman Church from the 
Irish, the question to which communion IsTorthumbria should be- 
long was of immense moment to the after- fortunes of England. 
Had the Church of Aidan finally won, the later ecclesiastical his- 
tory of England would probably have resembled that of Ireland. 
Devoid of that power of organization which was the strength of 
the Roman Church, the Celtic Church in its own Irish home took 
the clan system of the country as the basis of church government. 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



65 



Tribal quarrels and ecclesiastical controversies became inextrica- 
bly confounded ; and the clergy, robbed of all really spiritual in- 
fluence, contributed no element save that of disorder to the state. 
Hundreds of wandering bishops, a vast religious authority wielded 
by hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of piety from morality, 
the absence of those larger and more humanizing influences which 
contact with a Avider world alone can give, this is the picture 
which the Irish Church of later times presents to us. It was from 
such a chaos as this that England was saved by the victory of 
Rome in the Synod of Whitby. 

The Church of England, as we know it to-day, is the work, so 
far as its outer form is concerned, of a Greek monk, Theodore of 
Tarsus, whom Rome in 668 dispatched after her victory at Whit- 
by to secure England to her sway, as Archbishop of Canterbury, 
Theodore's work was determined in its main outlines by the pre- 
vious history of the English people. The conquest of the Conti- 
nent had been wrought either by races such as the Goths, which 
were already Christian, or by heathens like the Franks, who bow- 
ed to the Christian faith of the nations they conquered. To this 
oneness of religion between the German invaders of the Empire 
and their Roman subjects was owing the preservation of all that 
survived of the Roman world. The Church every where remain- 
ed untouched. The Christian bishop became the defender of the 
conquered Italian or Gaul against his Gothic and Lombard con- 
queror, the mediator between the German and his subjects, the 
one bulwark against barbaric violence and oppression. To the 
barbarian, on the other hand, he was the representative of all that 
was venerable in the past, the living record of law, of letters, and 
of art. But in Britain the priesthood and the people had been 
exterminated together. When Theodore came to organize the 
Church of England, the very, memory of the older Christian 
Chui'ch which existed in Roman Britain had passed away. The 
first Christian missionaries, strangers in a heathen land, attached 
themselves necessarily to the courts of the kings, who were their 
first converts, and whose conversion was generally followed by 
that of their people. The English bishops were thus at first roy- 
al chaplains, and their diocesewas naturally nothing but the king- 
dom. Realms which ai'e all but forgotten are thus commemo- 
rated in the limits of existing sees. That of Rochester represent- 
ed till of late an obscure kingdom of West Kent, and the frontier 
of the original kingdom of Mercia may be recovered by following 
the map of the ancient bishopric of Lichfield. Theodore's first 
work was to add many new sees to the old ones ; his second was 
to group all of them round the one centre, of Canterbury. All 
ties between England and the Irish Church were roughly loroken, 
Lindisfarne sank into obscurity with the flight of Colman and his 
monks. The new prelates, gathered in synod after synod, ac- 
knowledged the authority of their one primate. The organiza- 
tion of the episcopate was followed by the organization of the 
parish system. The loose system of the mission-station, the mon- 
astery from which priest and bishop went forth on journey after 

5 



66 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



journey to preach and baptize, as Aid an went forth from Lindis- 
farne, or Cuthbert from Meh'ose, naturally disappeared as the land 
became Christian. The missionaries became settled clergy. The 
holding of the English noble or land-owner became the parish, and 
his chaplain the i:)arish priest, as the king's chaplain had become 
the bishop, and the kingdom his diocese. A source of permanent 
endowment for the clergy was found at a later time in the revival 
of the Jewish system of tithes, and in the annual gift to Church 
purposes of a tenth of the produce of the soil ; while discipline 
within the Church itself was provided for by an elaborate code 
of sin and joenance, in which the principle of compensation, which 
lay at the root of Teutonic legislation, crept into the relations be- 
tween God and the soul. 

In his work of organization, in his creation of parishes, in his 
arrangement of dioceses, and the way in which he grouped them 
round the see of Canterbury, in his national synods and ecclesias- 
tical canons, Theodore was unconsciously doing a political work. 
The old divisions of kingdoms and tribes about him, divisions 
which had sprung for the most part from mere accidents of the 
conquest, were fast breaking down. The smaller states were by 
this time practically absorbed b}'- the three larger ones, and of 
these three Mercia and Wessex were compelled to bow to the 
overlordship of Northumbria. The tendency to national unity 
which was to characterize the new England had thus already de- 
clared itself; but the policy of Theodore clothed with a sacred 
form and surrounded with divine sanctions a unity which as yet 
rested on no basis but the sword. The single throne of the one 
Primate at Canterbury accustomed men's minds to the thought 
of a single throne for their one temporal overlord at York, or, as 
in later days, at Lichfield or at Winchester. The regular subor- 
dination of priest to bishop, of bishop to jiirimate, in the adminis- 
tration of the Church, supplied a mould on which the civil organ- 
ization of the state quickly shaped itself Above all, the councils 
gathered by Theodore were the first of all national gathei'ings for 
general legislation. It was at a much later time that the Wise 
Men of Wessex, or Northumbria, or Mercia, learned to come to- 
gether in the Witenagemote of all 'England. It was the ecclesi- 
astical synods which by their example led the way to our nation- 
al parliaments, as it was the canons enacted in such synods which 
led the Avay to a national system of law. But if the movement 
toward national unity was furthered by the centralizing tenden- 
cies of the Church, it Avas furthered as powerfully by the over- 
powering strength of Northumbria. In arms the kingdom had 
but a single rival. Mercia, as we have seen, had partially recov- 
ered from the absolute subjection in which it was left after Pen- 
da's fall by shaking off the government of Oswi's thegns, and by 
choosing Wulfere for its king. Wulfere was a vigorous and act- 
ive ruler, and the peaceful reign of Oswi left him free to build up 
again during seventeen years of vigorous rule (659-675) the Mer- 
cian overlordship over the tribes of mid-England, which had been 
lost at Penda's death. For a while he had more than his father's 



!•] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



67 



success. Not only did Essex ao-.ain own his supremacy, but even 
London fell into Mercian hands: The West-Saxons, who had been 
long ago strij)ped of their conquests along the Severn by Penda, 
were driven across the Thames by Wulfere, and all their settle- 
ments to the north of that river were annexed to the Mercian 
realm. One result of Wulfere's conquest remains to the present 
day ; for the old bishop-stool of the West-Saxons had been estab- 
lished by Biriiius at what was then the royal city of Dorchester; 
and it is to its i-etreat, with the kings of Wessex, to the town 
Avhich became the new capital of their shrunken realm that we 
owe the bishopric of Winchester. The supremacy of Mercia soon 
reached even across the Thames, for Sussex, in its dread of the 
West- Saxons, found protection in accepting Wulfere's overlord- 
ship, and its king was rewarded hj a gift of the two outlying 
settlements of the Jutes — the Isle of Wight and the lands of the 
Meonwaras along the Southampton water — which we must sup- 
pose had been reduced by Mercian arms. 

The industrial progress of the Mercian kingdom went hand in 
hand with its military advance. The forests of its western boi-- 
der, the marshes of its eastern coast, were being cleared and drain- 
ed by monastic colonies, whose success shows the hold which 
Christianity had now gained over its people. Heathenism, indeed, 
still held its own in the western woodlands, where the miners 
around Alcester drowned the voice of Bishop Ecgwine of Worces- 
ter, as he preached to them, with the din of their hammers. But 
in spite of their hammers Ecgwine's preaching left one lasting 
mark behind it. The bishop heard how a swine-herd coming out 
from the forest depths on a sunny glade had seen the Three Fair 
Women of the old German mythology seated round a mystic bush 
and singing their unearthly song. In his fancy the Fair Women 
transformed themselves into a vision of the mother of Christ ; and 
the silent glade soon became the site of an abbey dedicated to her, 
and of a town which sprang np under its shelter — the Evesham 
which was to be hallowed in after-time by the fall of Earl Simon 
of Leicester. Wilder even than the western woodland was the 
desolate fen-country on the eastern border of the kingdom stretch- 
ing from the "Holland," the sunk, hollow land of Lincolnshire, to 
the channel of the Ouse, a wilderness of shallow waters and reedy 
islets wrapped in its own dark mist-veil, and tenanted only by 
flocks of screaming wild fowl. Here through the liberality of 
King Wulfere rose the abbey of Peterborough. Here, too, Guth- 
lac, a youth of the royal race of Mercia, sought a refuge from the 
world in the solitudes of Crowland, and so great was the reverence 
he won, that only two years had passed since his death when the 
stately abbey of Crowland rose over his tomb. Earth was brought 
in boats to form a site ; the buildings rested on oaken piles driven 
into the marsh; a great stone church replaced the hermit's cell; 
and the toil of the new brotherhood changed the pools around them 
into fertile meadow-land. The abbey of Ely, as stately as that of 
Crowland, was founded in the same wild fen country by the Lady 
^thelthryth, the wife of King Ecgfrith,who in the year 670 sue- 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ceeded Oswi on the throne of Northumbria. Her flight from 
Ecgfrith's pursuit, and the shelter given her by Wulfere, may have 
aided to hurry on fresh contests between the two kingdoms. But 
the aid was hardly needed. His success was long and unvarying 
enough to fire Wulfere to a renewal of his father's effort to shake 
off the Northumbrian overlordship, an overlordship which Mercia 
had not ceased to acknowledge even though she had freed herself 
from the yoke of direct subjection. But the vigorous and warlike 
Ecgfrith was a different foe from the West-Saxon or the Jute, and. 
the defeat of the king of Mercia was so complete that he was glad 
to purchase peace by giving up to his conquerors the province of 
the Lindiswaras or Lincolnshire. 

Peace would have been purchased more hardly had not Ecg- 
frith's ambition turned rather to conquests over the Briton than 
to victoi-ies over his fellow-Englishmen. The war between Brit- 
on and Englishman, which had languished, since the battle of 
Chester, had been revived some twelve years before by an advance 
of the West-Saxons to the south-west. Unable to save the pos- 
sessions of Wessex north of the Thames from the gras^D of Wul- 
fere, its king, Cenwalh, sought for compensation in an attack on 
his Welsh neighbors. A victory at Bradford on the Avon ena- 
bled him to overrun the country north of Mendip, which had till 
then been held by the Britons; and a second campaign in 6,58, 
which ended in a victory on the skirts of the great forest that cov- 
ered Somerset to the east, settled the West-Saxons as conquerors 
round the sources of the Parret, It was probably the example of 
the West-Saxons which spurred Ecgfrith to a series of attacks 
upon his British neighbors in the west which raised l^orthurabria 
to its highest pitch of glory. Up to the very moment of his fall, 
indeed, the reign of Ecgfrith marks the highest pitch of Northum- 
brian power. His armies chased the Britons from the kingdom 
of Cumbria, and made the district of Carlisle English ground, A 
large part of the conquered country was bestowed upon the see of 
Lindisfarne, which w^as at this time filled by one whom we have 
seen before laboring as the apostle of the Lowlands. After yeai-s 
of mission labor at Melrose, Cuthbert had quitted it for Holy 
Island, and preached among the moors of Northumberland as he 
had preached beside the banks of Tweed. He remained there 
through the great secession which followed on the Synod of Whit- 
by, and became prior of the dwindled company of brethren, now 
torn with endless disputes, against which his patience and good- 
humor struggled in vain. Worn out at last, he fled to a little 
sand-bank, one of a group of islets not far from Ida's fortress 
of Bamborough, strewed for the most part with kelp and sea- 
weed, the home of the gull and the seal. In the midst of it rose 
his hut of rough stones and turf, dug down within deep into the 
rock, and roofed with logs and straw. 

The reverence for his sanctity di'agged Cuthbert back in old 
age to fill the vacant see of Lindisfarne, He entered Carlisle, 
which the king had bestowed upon the bishopric, at a moment 
when all Northumbria was waiting for news of a fresh campaign 



I-] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



of Ecgfiitli's against the Britons 'in the north. The Firth of For. 
had long been the northern limit of ISTorthnmhria, and the Whit- 
hern, the "white stone town," in Avhich a l*Torthumbriau bishop, 
Truniwine, fixed the seat of his new bishopric of Galloway, was a 
sign of the subjection of the Britons of that district to the North- 
umbrian overlordship. Ecgfrith, however, resolved to carry his 
conquests farther to the north, and crossing the Firth of Forth, 
his army marched in the year 685 into the land of the Picts. A 
sense of coming ill weighed on Northumbria, and its dread was 
quickened by a memory of the curses which had been pronounced 
by the bishops of Ireland on its king, when his navy, setting out 
a year before from the newly-conquered western coast, swept the 
Irish shores in a raid which seemed like sacrilege to those who 
loved the home of Aidan and Columba. As Cuthbert bent over 
a Roman fountain which still stood unharmed among the ruins (jf 
Carlisle, the anxious by-standers thought they caught words of 
ill omen falling from the old man's lips. "Perhaps," he seemed 
to murmur, " at this very hour the peril of the fight is over and 
done." " Watch and pi"ay," he said, when they questioned him 
on the morrow ; " watch and pray." In a few days more a sol- 
itary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told that the Picts had 
turned desperately to bay, as the English army entered Fife ; and 
that Ecgfrith and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of 
corpses, on the far-off moor-land of Nechtansniere (685). 

To Cuthbert the tidings were tidings of death. His bishopric 
was soon laid aside, and two months after his return to his island- 
hermitage the old man lay dying, murmuring to the last words of 
concord and peace. A signal of his death had been agreed upon, 
and one of those who stood by ran with a candle in each hand to 
a place whence the light might be seen by a monk Avho was look- 
ing out from the watch-tower of Lindisfarne. As the tiny gleam 
flashed over the dark reach of sea, and the Avatchman hurried with 
his news into the jchurch, the brethren of Holy Island were sing- 
ing, as it chanced, the words of the Psalmist : " Thou hast cast 
lis out and scattered us abroad; Thou hast also been displeased; 
Thou hast shown thy people heavy things ; Thou hast given us a 
drink of deadly wine." The chant was the dirge, not of Cuthbert 
only, but of his church and his people. Over both hung from that 
hour the gloom of a seeming failure. Strangers who knew not 
lona and Columba entered into the heritage of Aidan and Cuth- 
bert. As the Roman Communion folded England again beneath 
her wing, men forgot that a Church which passed utterly away 
had battled with Rome for the spiritual headship of Western 
Christendom, and that English religion had for a hundred years 
its centre not at Canterbury, but at Lindisfarne. 'Nov were men 
long to remember that from the days of ^thelfrith to the days 
of Ecgfrith English politics had found their centre at York. But, 
forgotten or no, Northumbria had done its work. By its mission- 
aries and by its sword it had won England from heathendom to 
the Christian Church. It had given her a new poetic literature. 
Its monasteries were alread)?- the seat of whatever intellectual life 



HI8T0BY OF THE ENGLISR PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



.e country possessed. Above all it had been the first to gather 
together into a loose political unity the various tribes of the En- 
glish people, and by standing at their head for nearly, a century 
to accustom them to a national life, out of which England, as we 
have it now, was to spring. 



Section IV.— Tiie Overlordship of Mercia, 685—823. 

[Authorities. — A few incidents of Mercian history are preserved among the mea- 
gre annals of Wessex, which form, during this period, "The Enghsh Chronicle." 
But for the most part we are thrown upon later writers, especially Henry of Hun- 
tingdon and William of Malmesbuiy, both authors of the twelfth century, but hav- 
ing access to older materials now lost. The letters of Boniface, which form the 
most valuable contemporary materials for this period, are given by Dr. Giles (Boni- 
facii Opera Omnia. London : 1844). Those of Alcwine have been carefully edited 
by Jaft'e in his series of Monumenta Germanica.] 



The supremacy of Northumbria fell forever with the death of 
Ecgfrith and the defeat of jN'echtansmere. To the north the 
flight of Bishop Trumwine from Whithern announced the revolt 
of Galloway from her rule. In the south, Mercia at once took up 
again the projects of independence which had been crushed by 
Wulfere's defeat. His successor, the Mercian king ^thelred, 
again seized the province of the Lindiswaras, and the war he th^ts 
began with ISTorthumbria Avas only ended by a peace negotiated 
through Archbishop Theodore, which left him master of Middle 
England, and free to attempt the direct conquest of the south. 
For the moment indeed the attempt proved a fruitless one, for at 
the instant of ISTorthumbria's fall Wessex rose into fresh jDOwer 
under lui, tlie greatest of its early kings. Under his predecessor, 
Centwine, it had again taken up its war with the Britons, and con- 
quered as far as the Quantocks. Ini, whose reign covered the long- 
period from 688 to 726, carried on during the whole of it the war 
which Centwine had begun. He pushed his way southward round 
the marshes of the Parret to a more fertile territory, and guarded 
the frontier of his new conquests by a wooden fort on the banks 
of the Tone, which has grown into the present Taunton. The 
West-Saxons thus became masters of the whole district which 
now bears the name of Somerset, the shire of the Sumer-soetas, 
where the Tor rose like an island out of a waste of flood-drowned 
fen that stretched westward to the Channel. At the base of this 
hill Ini established on the site of an older British foundation his 
famous monastery of Glastonbury. The monastery probably took 
this English name from an English family, the Gloestings, who 
chose the spot for their settlement ; but it had long been a place 
of pilgrimage, and the tradition of its having been the resting- 
place of a second Patrick drew thither the wandering scholars of 
Ireland. The first inhabitants of Ini's abbey found, as they al- 
leged, " an ancient church built by no art of man ;" and to this 
relic of a Roman time they added their own oratory of stone. 
The spiritual charge of his conquests Ini committed to Ealdhelm, 



I.] 



TRE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



71 



the most famous scholar of his day, who became the first bishop 
of the see of Sherborne, which the King formed out of a part of 
the older diocese of Winchester so as to include the new parts 
of his kingdom. Ini's code, the earliest collection of West-Saxon 
laws which remains to us, shows a wise solicitude to provide for 
the civil as well as the ecclesiastical organization of his kingdom. 
His repulse of the Mercians, when they at last attacked Wessex, 
showed how well he could provide for its defense. Ceolred, the 
successor of ^thelred on the throne of Mercia, began the struggle 
with Wessex for the overlordship of the south ; but he was re- 
pulsed in 714 in a bloody encounter at Wodnesburh, on the bor- 
ders of the two kingdoms. Able, however, as Ini was to hold 
Mercia at bay, he was unable to hush the civil strife that was the 
curse of Wessex, and a wild legend tells the story of the disgust 
which drove him from the world. He had feasted royally at one 
of his country houses, and on the morrow, as he rode from it, his 
Queen bade him turn back thither. The King returned to find his 
house stripped of curtains and vessels, and foul with refuse and 
the dung of cattle, while in the royal bed where he had slept with 
^thelburh rested a sow with her larrow of pigs. The scene had 
no need of the Queen's comment: "See, my lord, how the fashion 
of this world passeth away !" In 726 Ini laid down his crown, 
and sought peace and death in a pilgrimage to Rome. 

The anarchy which had driven Ini from the throne broke out on 
his departure in civil strife which left Wessex an easy prey to the 
successor of Ceolred. Among those who sought Guthlac's retire- 
ment at Crowland came ^thelbald, a Mercian of royal blood fly- 
ing from Ceolred's hate. Driven off again and again by the King's 
pursuit, ^thelbald still returned to the little hut he had built be- 
side the hermitage, comforting himself in hours of despair with his 
companion's words. "Know how to wait," said Guthlac, " and 
the kingdom will come to thee; not by violence or rapine, but by 
the hand of God." In 716 Ceolred fell frenzy-smitten at his board, 
and Mercia chose ^thelbald for its king. Already the realm 
reached from Humber to Thames ; and ^thelred, crossing the 
latter river, had reduced Kent beneath his overlordship. But 
with .^thelbald began Mercia's fiercest struggle for the complete 
supremacy of the south. He penetrated into the very heart of 
the West-Saxon kingdom, and his siege and capture of the royal 
town of Somerton in 733 ended the war. For twenty years the 
overlordship of Mercia was recognized by all Britain south of the 
Humber. ^thelbald styled himself " King not of the Mercians 
only, but of all the neighboring peoples who are called by the 
common name of Southern English." The use of a title unknown 
till his day, that of "King of Britain," betrayed the daring hope 
that the creation of an English realm, so long attempted in vain 
by the kings of Northumbria, might be reserved for the new pow- 
er of Mercia. But the aim of ^thelbald was destined to the same 
failure as that of his predecessors. England north of Humber was 
saved from his grasp by the heroic defense made by the Northum- 
brian kinsf Eadberht, who renewed for a while the fadino- o-lories 



72 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of his kingdom by an alliance with the Picts, which enabled him 
in 765 to conquer Strathclyde, and take its capital, Alcluyd, or 
Dumbarton. Southern England was wrested from Mercia by a 
revolt into which the West-Saxons were driven through the in- 
tolerable exactions of their new overlord. At the head of his own 
Mercian army, and of the subject hosts of Kent, Essex, and East- 
Anglia, ^thelbald marched in 752 to the field of Burford, where 
the West-Saxons were again marshaled under the golden dragon 
of their race ; but after hours of desperate fighting in the very 
forefront of the battle, a sudden panic seized the Mercian King, 
and he fled first of his army from the field, A second Mercian 
defeat at Secandun in 755 confirmed the freedom of Wessex, but 
amidst the rout of his host ^thelbald redeemed the one hour of 
shame that had tarnished his glory. He refused to fly, and fell 
on the field. 

While Mercia was thus battling for the overlordship of the 
south, Northumbria had set aside its glory in arms for the pur- 
suits of peace. Under the peaceful reigns of Ecgfrith's successors, 
Eadfrith the Learned and Coelwulf, their kingdom became in the 
middle of the eighth century the literary centre of the Christian 
world in Western Europe. No schools were more famous than 
those of Jarrow and York. The whole learning of the age seemed 
to be summed up in a Northumbrian scholar. Ba3da — the Vener- 
able Bede as later times styled him — was born about ten years 
after the Synod of Whitby, beneath the shade of a great abbey 
which Benedict Biscop was rearing by the mouth of the Wear. 
His youth was trained, and his long tranquil life was Avholly spent 
in an ofishoot of Benedict's house which was founded by his scholar 
Ceolfrid. Bseda never stirred from Jarrow. "I spent my whole 
life in the same monastery," he says; "and while attentive to the 
rule of my order and the service of the Church, my constant pleas- 
ure lay in learning, or teaching, or writing." The words sketch 
for us a scholar's life, the more touching in its simplicity that it 
is the life of the first great English scholar. The quiet grandeur 
of a life coiisecrated to knowledge, the tranquil pleasure that lies 
in learning and teaching and writing, dawned for Englishmen in 
the story of Bseda. While still young, he became teacher, and 
six hundred monks, besides strangers that flocked thither for in- 
struction, formed his school of Jarrow. It is hard to imagine how 
among the toils of the school-master and the duties of the monk 
Bseda could have found time for the composition of the numerous 
works that made his name famous in the West. But materials 
for study had accumulated in Northumbria through the journeys 
of Wilfrith and Benedict Biscop, and Archbishop Ecgberht was 
forming the first English library at York. The tradition of the 
older Irish teachers still lingered to direct the young scholar into 
that path of Scriptural interpretation to which he chiefly owed his 
fame. Greek, a rare accomplishment in the West, came to him 
from the school which the Greek Archbishop Theodore founded 
beneath the walls of Canterbury. His skill in the ecclesiastical 
chant was derived from a Roman cantor whom Pope Vitalian had 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



73 



sent in the train of Benedict Biscop. Little by little the young 
scholar thus made himself master of the whole range of the sci- 
ence of his time ; he became, as Burke rightly styled him, " the 
father of English learning." The tradition of the older classic 
cultiire was first revived for England in his quotations of Plato 
and Aristotle, of Seneca and Cicero, of Lucretius and Ovid. Vir- 
gil cast over him the same spell that he cast over Dante ; verses 
from the ^neid break his narratives of martyrdoms, and the dis- 
ciple ventures on the track of the great master in a little eclogue 
descriptive of the approach of spring. His work was done with 
small aid from others. " I am my own secretary," he writes ; " I 
make my own notes. I am my own librarian." But forty-five 
works remained after his death to attest his prodigious industry. 
In his own eyes and those of his contemporaries the most impor- 
tant among these were the commentaries and homilies upon vari- 
ous books of the Bible which he had drawn from the writings of 
the Fathers. But he was far from confining himself to theology. 
In treatises compiled as text-books for his scholars, Bosda threw 
together all that the world had then accumulated in astronomy 
and meteorology, in physics and music, in philosophy, grammar, 
rhetoric, arithmetic, medicine. But the encyclopedic character of 
his researches left him in heart a simple Englishman. He loved 
his own English tongue, he was skilled in English song, his last 
Avork was a translation into English of the Gospel of St. John, and 
almost the last words that broke from his lips Avere some English 
rhymes upon death. 

But the noblest proof of his love of England lies in the work 
which immortalizes his name. In his "Ecclesiastical History of 
the English Nation," Bseda was at once the founder of medijBval 
history and the first English historian. All that we really know 
of the century and a half that follow the landing of Augustine, 
we know from him. Wherever his own personal observation ex- 
tended, the story is told with admirable detail and force. He is 
hardly less full or accurate in the portions which he owed to his 
Kentish friends, Alcwine and Nothelm. What he owed to no in- 
formant was his own exquisite faculty of story-telling, and yet no 
story of his own telling is so touching as the story of his death. 
Two weeks before the Easter of 755 the old man was seized with 
an extreme weakness and loss of breath. He still preserved, how- 
ever, his usual pleasantness and gay good-humor, and in spite of 
prolonged sleeplessness continued his lectures to the pupils about 
him. Verses of his own English tongue broke from time to time 
from the master's lip — rude rhymes that told how before the " need- 
fare," Death's stern "must go," none can enough bethink him 
what is to be his doom for good or ill. The tears of Basda's schol- 
ars mingled with his song. " We never read without weeping," 
writes one of them. So the days rolled on to Ascension-tide, and 
still master and pupils toiled at their work, for Bseda longed to 
bring to an end his version of St. John's Gospel into the Enrrlish 
tongue, and his extracts from Bishop Isidore. "I don't wanfmy 
boys to read a lie," he answered those who would have had him 



74 



HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISR PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



rest, " or to work to no purpose, after I am gone." A few days 
before Ascension-tide his sickness grew upon him, but he spent 
the whole day in teaching, only saying cheerfully to his scholars, 
"Learn with what speed you may; I know not how long I may 
last." The dawn broke on another sleepless night, and again 
the old man called his scholars round him and bade them write. 
" There is still a chapter wanting," said the scribe, as the morning 
drew on, " and it is hard for thee to question thyself any longer." 
"It is easily done," said Bseda; "take thy pen and write quickly." 
Amid tears and farewells the day wore on to even-tide. " There 
is yet one sentence unwritten, dear master," said the boy. " Write 
it quickly," bade the dying man. " It is finished now," said the 
little scribe at last. " You speak truth," said the master ; " all is 
finished now." Placed upon the pavement, his head supported in 
his scholar's arms, his face turned to the spot where he was wont 
to pray, Bseda chanted the solemn " Glory to God." As his voice 
reached the close of his song, he passed quietly away. 

First among English scholars, first among English theologians, 
first among English historians, it is in the monk of Jarrow that En- 
glish literature strikes its roots. In the six hundred scholars who 
gathered round him for instruction he is the father of our national 
education. In his pliysical treatises he is the first figure to which 
our science looks back. Bseda was a statesman as Avell as a schol- 
ar, and the letter which in the last year of his life he addressed to 
Archbishop Ecgberht of York shows how vigorously he proposed 
to battle against the growing anarchy of Northumbria. But his 
plans of reform came too late; and though a king like Eadberht 
might beat back the inroads of the Mercians and even conquer 
Strathclyde, before the anarchy of his own kingdom even Ead- 
berht could only fling down his sceptre and seek a refuge in the 
cloisters of Lindisfarne. From the death of Basda tlie history of 
Northumbria is in fact only a wild story of lawlessness and blood- 
shed. King after king was swept away by treason and revolt, 
the country fell into the hands of its turbulent nobles, the very 
fields lay waste, and the land was swept by famine and plague. 
An anarchy almost as complete had fallen on Wessex after its re- 
pulse of ^thelbald's invasion. Only in Mercia was there any sign 
of order and settled rule. 

The two crushing defeats at Burford and Secandun were far 
from having broken the Mercian power. Under Ofia, whose reign 
from 758 to 796 covers with that of -^thelbald nearly the whole 
of the eighth century, it rose to a height unknown before. The 
energy of the new king -was shown in his struggle with the Welsh 
on his western border. Since the dissolution of the temporary al- 
liance which Penda formed with the Welsh King Cadwallon, the 
war with the Britons in the west had been the one fatal hinderance 
to the progress of Mercia. ^thelbald had led in vain the united 
forces of his under-kings, and even of Wessex, against Wales. 
But it was under Offa that Mercia first really braced herself to 
the completion of her British conquests. Beating back the Welsh 
from Hereford, and carrying his own ravages into the heart of 



I-] 



TRE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



75 



Wales, Offa drove the Kiug of Powys from his capital, which 
changed its old name of Pengwern for the significant English ti- 
tle of the Town in >the Scrub or Bush, Scrobbesbyryg, Shrews- 
bury. Experience, however, had taught the Mercians the worth- 
lessness of raids like these. Oifa resolved to create a military bor- 
der by planting a settlement of Englishmen between the Severn, 
which had till then served as the western boundary of the English 
race, and the huge " Offix's Dike," which he drew from the mouth 
of Wye to that of Dee. Here, as in the later conquests of the 
West -Saxons, we find the old plan of extermination definitely 
abandoned. The Welsh who chose to remain dwelt undisturbed 
among their English conquerors, and it was to regulate the mu- 
tual relations of the two races that Ofia drew up a code of Mer- 
cian laws which bore his name. From these conquests over the 
Britons, Ofia turned to make a fresh attempt to gain that over- 
lordship over Britain which his predecessors had failed to win. 
His policy was marked by a singular combination of activity and 
self-restraint. He refrained carefully from any efibrt to realize 
his aim by force of arms. An expedition against the town of 
Hastings, indeed, with a victory at Otford on the Derweut, re-as- 
serted the supremacy of Mercia over Kent, when it was shaken for 
a time by a revolt of the Kentishmen ; and East-Anglia seems to 
have been directly annexed to the Mercian kingdom. But his 
relations with IsTorthumbria and with Wessex were for the most 
part peaceful, and his aim was rather at the exercise of a com- 
manding influence over them than at the assertion of any over- 
lordship in name. He avenged ^thelbald's defeats by a victory 
over the West-Saxons at Bensington, but he attempted no subju- 
gation of their country. He contented himself with placing a 
creature of his own on its throne, and with wedding him to his 
daughter Eadburh. The marriage of a second daughter with the 
King of Northumbria established a similar influence in the north. 
Both the ISTorthumbrian and the West-Saxon kings were threat- 
ened by rival claimants of their thrones, and both looked for aid 
against them to the arms of Ofia. Without jarring against their 
jealous assertion of independence, Ofia had in fact brought both 
Wessex and Northumbria into dependence on Mercia. 

Such a supremacy must soon have passed into actual sovereign- 
ty, but for the intervention at this moment of a power from across 
the sea, the power of the Franks. The connection of the Franks 
with the English kingdoms at this time was brought about by a 
missionary from Wessex. Boniface (or Winfrith) followed in the 
track of earlier preachers, both Irish and English, who had been 
laboring to little purpose among the heathens of Germany, and 
especially among those who had now become subjects to the 
Franks. It was through the disciples whom he planted along the 
line of his labors that the Frankish sovereigns were drawn to an 
interest in English afifairs. Whether from mere jealousy of a 
neighbor state, or from designs of an invasion and conquest of 
England which the growth of any great central power in the island 
would check, the support of the weaker kingdoms against Mercia 



16 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



became the policy of the Frankish Court. When Eadberht of 
Northumbria was attacked by ^thelbald of Mercia, the Frank 
King Pippin sent him presents and the offer of an alliance. When 
Pippin's son, Charles the Great, succeeded him, he received with 
favor an appeal for protection sent by King Ealhred of Northum- 
bria through Lullus, who had followed Boniface as Archbishop of 
Maihtz. The Court of Charles became a place of refuge for the 
enemies of Offa ; for Eardwulf, a claimant of the Northumbrian 
crown, who was driven from Northumbria by the husband of one 
of Offa's daughters, and for Ecgberht, a claimant of the West- 
Saxon crown, who was driven from Wessex by the husband of an- 
other. A revolt of Kent against Mercia at last brought Charles 
and Offa into open collision. Kent appealed to Charles for pro- 
tection, but the threats of Charles were met by Offa with defi- 
ance. The Mercian army reconquered Kent ; and a plot of Jaen- 
berht, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for bringing about a landing 
of Frankish ti'oops, was discovered and defeated. Offa drove the 
archbishop into exile, and punished his see by setting up Lichfield 
as a rival archbishopric. The failure of a marriage negotiation 
widened the breach between the two sovereigns : each closed the 
ports on his own side of the channel against the subjects of the 
other ; and war was only averted by the efforts of a Northum- 
brian scholar, Alcwine, whose learning had secured him the confi- 
dence and friendship of Charles the Great. , 

The good sense of the Frankish sovereign probably told him 
that the time was not come for any projects against Britain. Se- 
cure on either border, his kingdom wealthy with years of peace 
and order, and his armies fresh from victories over Welshman and 
Kentishman, Offa was no unworthy antagonist for Charles the 
Great. Charles therefore not only declined a struggle, but nego- 
tiated with his rival a treaty, memorable as the first monument 
of our foreign diplomacy, which secured protection for the En- 
glish merchants and pilgrims who were making their way in grow- 
ing numbers to Rome. But the death of Offa in '796 at once re- 
opened the strife. The hand of Charles was seen in a new revolt 
of Kent, and in the support which he gave to the appeal of the 
Archbishop of Canterbury against the archbishopric which Offa 
had set up at Lichfield. Cenwulf, Offa's successor, showed a vigor 
and moderation worthy of Offa himself He roughly put down 
the Kentish revolt, and then conciliated the Kentish archbishop by 
the suppression of the rival see. But the next move of Charles 
proved a more fatal one. On the death of Beornred, the sover- 
eign whom Offa had set up over Wessex, Ecgberht was at once 
dispatched from the Frankish Court, and welcomed by the West- 
Saxons as their king. Some years after, the influence of Charles 
brought about the restoration of Eardwulf, who, like Ecgberht, 
had taken refuge at his court, to the throne of Northumbria. In 
the north as in the south, the work of Offa was thus undone. 
Within, Mercia was torn by a civil war which broke out on Cen- 
wulf's death ; and the weakness which this produced was seen 
when the old strife with Wessex was renewed by his successor. 



ENGLAOT) 

in the 
NINTH CENTURY 




I-: 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



In 823 Beornwulf penetrated into Wiltshire, and was defeated in 
a bloody battle at Ellandun, All England south of the Thames 
at once submitted to Ecgberht of Wessex, and East-Anglia rose 
in a desperate revolt which proved fatal to its Mercian rulers. 
Beornwulf and his successor Ludeca fell in two great defeats at 
the hands of the East-Anglians ; and Wiglaf had hardly mounted 
the Mercian throne when his exhausted kingdom was called on 
again to encounter the West -Saxon. While Mercia was strug- 
fflino- ao-ainst the revolt of East-Anglia, Ecgberht had carried on 
the old war of Wessex with the Briton, had conquered and col- 
onized Devon, and fixed the new English border at the Tamar. 
The Aveakness of Mercia after its two defeats called him to a 
greater conquest. In 827 his army marched northward without 
a struggle. Wiglaf fled helplessly before it ; and Mercia bowed 
to the WestrSaxon overlordship. From Mercia Ecgberht marched 
on Northumbria, but a century of bloodshed and anarchy had 
robbed that kingdom of all vigor, and its nobles met him at the 
Don with an acknowledgment of his overlordship. He turned to 
the West ; and the Welsh, Avho were still smarting from the 
heavy blows inflicted on them by Mercia, submitted to the joint 
army of Mercians and West -Saxons which he led into the field. 
The dream of Eadwine and of Ofia seemed at last made real: and 
in right of an overlordship which stretched from the Forth to the 
British Channel Ecgberht styled himself "the King of the En- 
glish." 

Section V.— Wessex and the Danes, 800—880. 

[Authorities. — Our history here rests mainly on the English (or Anglo-Saxon) 
Chronicle. The earlier pai't of this is a compilation, and consists of (1) Annals of 
the conquest of South Britain, (2) Short notices of the kings and bishops of Wessex, 
expanded into larger form by copious insertions from Bifida, and after his death by 
briefer additions from some northern sources. (3) It is probable that these materials 
■were thrown together, and perhaps translated from Latin into English, in -iElfred's 
time, as a preface to the fiir fuller annals which begin with the reign of iEthelwulf, 
and widen into a great contemporary history when they reach that of Alfred him- 
self. Of their character and import as a part of English literature, I have spoken in 
the text. The "Life of Alfred," which bears the name of Asser, though valuable, 
as at least founded on contemporary authority, must, in its present shape, be re- 
gai-ded as of a later date. There is an admirable modern life of the king by Dr. 
Pauli.] 

As the Frank had undermined the greatness of Mercia, so the 
Dane struck down the short-lived greatness of Wessex. Norway 
and its fellow Scandinavian kingdoms, Sweden and Denmark, 
were being brought at this time into more settled order by a 
series of great sovereigns, and the bolder spirits who would not 
submit to their rule were driven to the sea, and embraced a life 
of piracy and war. Ecgberht had hardly brought all Britain un- 
der his sway when these Danes, as all the Northmen were at this 
time called, were seen hovering ofi" the English coast, and grow- 
ing in numbers and hardihood as they crept southward to the 
Thames. The first sight of the Danes is as if the hand on the 



78 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



dial of history had gone back three hundred years. The same 
Norwegian fiords, the same Frisian sand-banks, pour forth their 
pirate fleets as in the days of Hengest and Cerdic. There is the 
same wild panic as the black boats of the invaders strike inland 
along the river reaches, or moor round the river islets, the same 
sights of horror — firing of homesteads, slaughter of men, women 
driven ofi" to slavery or shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in 
the market-place — as when the English invaders attacked Britain. 
Christian priests were again slain at the altar by Avorshipers of 
Woden, for the Danes were still heathen. Letters, arts, religion, 
governments disappeared before these Northmen as before the 
Northmen of old. But when the wild burst of the storm was 
over, land, people, government re-appeared unchanged. England 
still remained England ; the Danes sank quickly into the mass 
of those around them ; and Woden yielded without a struggle to 
Christ. The secret of this difference between the two invasions 
was that the battle was no longer between men of different races. 
It was no longer a fight between Briton and German, between 
Englishman and Welshman. The Danes were the same people in 
blood and speech with the people they attacked ; they were in fact 
Englishmen bringing back to an England that had forgotten its 
origins the barbaric England of its pirate forefathers. Nowhere 
over Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else we^'e 
the combatants men of one blood and one speech. But just for 
this reason the fusion of the Northmen with their foes was no- 
where so peaceful and so complete. 

Under Ecgberht and his son ^thelwulf the attacks of the 
Danes were directed to the two extremities of the West-Saxon 
realm. They swept up the Thames to the plunder of London and 
Canterbury, and re-aroused the Welsh war on the frontier of Dev- 
on. It was in the alliance of the Danes with the Britons that the 
danger of these earlier inroads lay. Ecgberht defeated the united 
forces of these two enemies in a victory at Plengestesdun ; and his 
son ^thelwulf, who succeeded him in 836, drove back the AVelsh 
of North Wales who were encouraged to rise in revolt by the 
same Danish co-oi^eration. Danes and Welshmen were beaten 
again and again, and yet the danger grew greater year by year. 
King JEthelwulf fought strenuously in the defense of his realm; 
in the defeat of Charmouth, as in the victory at Aclea, he led his 
troops in jDerson against the sea-robber's. The dangers to the 
Christian faith from these heathen assailants roused the clergy to 
his aid. Swithhun, Bishop of Winchester, became ^thelwulf's 
minister ; Ealhstan, Bishop of Sherborne, became the most formi- 
dable among the soldiers of the Cross. The first complete victory 
over the Danes in an encounter at the mouth of the Parret was of 
Ealhstan's winning. At last hard fighting gained the realm a lit- 
tle respite ; for eight years the Danes left the land, and in 858 
^thelwulf died in peace. But these earlier Danish forays had 
been mere preludes to the real burst of the Danish storm. When 
it burst in its full force upon the island, it was no longer a series 
of plunder-raids, but the invasion of Britain by a host of conqrer- 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



ors who settled as they conquered. In 866 the Danes landed 
in East-Anglia, and marched in the next spring across the Plum- 
ber upon York. Civil strife, as usual, distracted the energies of 
Northurabria. Its subject-crown was disputed by two claimants, 
and when they united to meet this common danger both fell in 
the same defeat before the walls of their capital. Northumbria 
at once submitted to the Danes, and Mercia was only saved by a 
hasty march of King ^thelred, the successor of ^thelwulf, to its 
aid. JSthelred was the third of ^thelwulf 's sons, who had mount- 
ed the throne after the short reigns of his brothers, JEthelbald and 
^thelberht. But the Peace of Nottingham, by which ^thelred 
saved Mercia in 868, gave the Danes leisure to prepare for an in- 
vasion of East-Anglia, whose under-king, Eadmund, brought pris- 
oner before the Danish leaders, Avas bound to a tree and shot to 
death with arrows. His martyrdom by the heathen made him the 
St. Sebastian of English legend ; in later days his figure gleam- 
ed from the pictured windows of every church along the east- 
ern coast, and the stately Abbey of St. Edmundsbury rose over his 
relics. With Eadmund ended the line of East- Anglian under-kings, 
for his kingdom was not only conquered but divided among the 
soldiers of the Danish host, and their leader Guthrum assumed its 
crown. Then the Northmen turned to the richer spoil of the great 
abbeys of the Fen. Peterborough, Crowland, Ely, went up in 
flames, and their monks fled or were slain among the ruins. Mer- 
cia, though it was as yet still spared from actual conquest, crouch- 
ed in terror before the Danes, acknowledged them in 870 as its 
overlords, and paid them tribute. 

In five years the work of Ecgberht had been undone, and En- 
gland north of the Thames had been torn from the overlordship of 
Weasex. So rapid a conquest as the ^Danish conquest of North- 
nmbria, Mercia, and East-Anglia, had only been made possible by 
the temper of these kingdoms themselves. To them the conquest 
was simply their transfer from one overlord to another, and it 
would seem as if they preferred the overlordship of the Dane to 
the overlordship of the West-Saxon. It was another sign of the 
enormous difliculty of welding these kingdoms together into a sin- 
gle people. The time had now come for Wessex to fight, not for 
supremacy, but for life. As yet it seemed paralyzed by terror. 
With the exception of his one march on Nottingham, King JEthel- 
red had done nothing to save his under-kingdoms from the wreck. 
But the Danes no sooner pushed up Thames to Reading, than the 
West-Saxons, attacked on their own soil, turned fiercely at bay. 
The tongue of land between the Kennet and Thames was contest- 
ed in four doubtful battles, but ^thelred died in the midst of the 
struggle, and in 871 the withdrawal of the Danes left his young- 
est brother Alfred king, with a few years' breathing-space for his 
realm. It was easy for the quick eye of Alfred to see that the 
Danes had withdrawn simply with the view of gaining firmer foot- 
ing for a new attack; indeed, three years had hardly passed be- 
fore Mercia was invaded, and its under-king driven over-sea to 
make place for a tributary of the Danes. From Repton half their 



Sko. v. 

Wessex akd 
THE Danes. 
SOO-880. 



ESames and 
Wessex. 



80 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



host marched northward to the Tyne, dividing a land where there 
was little left to plunder, colonizing and tilling it, while Guthrura 
led the rest into his kingdom of East-Anglia to prepare for their 
next year's attack on Wessex. In 876 the Danish fleet appeared 
before Wareham, and Avhen driven thence by JElfred, threw them- 
selves into Exeter and allied themselves with the Welsh. Through 
the Avinter Alfred girded himself for this new peril. At break 
of spring his army closed round the town, while a hired fleet 
cruised oif the coast to guard against rescue. The peril of their 
brethren in Exeter forced a part of the Danish host which had re- 
mained at Wareham to put to sea with the view of aiding them, 
but they were caught in a mist by the English squadron and 
driven on the rocks of Swanage. 

Exeter was at last starved into surrender, and the Danes again 
swore to leave Wessex. They withdrew to -Gloucester, but MX- 
fred had hardly disbanded his troops when his enemies, roused by 
the arrival of fresh Iiordes eager for plunder, re-appeared at Chip- 
penham, and in the midwinter of 878 marched ravaging over the 
land. The surprise was complete, and for a month or two the 
general panic left no hope of resistance. Alfred, with his small 
band of followers, could only throw himself into a fort raised 
liastily in the isle of Athelney, among the marshes of the Parret. 
It was a position from which he could watch closely the move- 
ments of his foes, and Avitli the first burst of spring he called the 
thegns of Somerset to his standard, and still gathering his troops 
as he moved, marched through Wiltshire on the Danes. He found 
their host at Edington, defeated it in a great battle, and after a 
siege of fourteen days forced their camp to surrender. Their 
leader, Guthrum of East-Anglia, was baptized as a Christian and 
bound by a solemn peace or " frith," at Wedmore in Somerset. 
For ten years all danger from the Northmen was at an end. 

With the Peace of Wedmore in 878 began a work even more 
noble than this deliverance of Wessex fronl the Dane. " So long 
as I have lived," wrote Alfred in later days, "I have striven to 
live worthily." He longed, when death overtook him, " to leave 
to the men that come after a remembrance of liim in good works." 
The aim has been more than fulfilled. The memory of the life 
and doings of the noblest of English rulers lias come down to us 
living and distinct through the mist of exaggeration and legend 
that gathered round it. Politically or intellectually, indeed, the 
sphere of Alfred's action is too small to justify a comparison of 
him with the few whom the world claims as its greatest men. 
What really lifts him to their level is the moral grandeur of his 
life. He lived solely for the good of his people. He is the first 
instance in the histoiy of Christendom of the Cnristian king, of 
a ruler who put aside every personal aim or ambition to devote 
himself to the welfare of those whom he ruled. So long as he 
lived he strove " to live worthily ;" but in his mouth a life of 
worthiness meant a life of justice, temperance, self sacrifice. The 
Peace of Wedmore at once marked the temper of the man. Ar- 
dent warrior as he was, with a disorganized England before him, 



!■] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 607-1013. 



81 



lie set aside at thirty-one the dream of conquest to leave behind 
him the memory, not of victories but of " good works," of daily 
toils by which he secured peace, good government, education for 
his people. His policy was one of peace. He set aside all dreams 
of the recovery of the West-Saxon overlordship. With England 
across the Watling Street, a Roman road which ran from Chester 
to London, in other words with Northumbria, East- Anglia, and 
the bulk of Mercia, Alfred had nothing to do. All that he re- 
tained was his own Wessex, with London and the country round 
it, and with the districts north of the Thames which the Mercian 
King Wulfere had long ago torn away from Wessex, but which 
the Peace of Wedmore restored to Wessex again. Over these 
latter districts, to which the name of Mercia was now confined, 
Avhile the rest of the Mercian kingdom became known as the Five 
Boroughs of the Danes, Alfred set the Ealdorman -^thelred, the 
husband of his daughter ^thelflsed, a ruler well fitted by his cour- 
age and activity to"guard Wessex against inroads from the north. 
Against invasion from the sea he provided by a closer union of 
the dependent kingdoms of Kent and Sussex with Wessex itself, 
by the better organization of military service, and by the creation 
of a fleet. 

The defense of his realm thus provided for, he devoted himself 
to its good government. His work was of a simple and practical 
order. He was wanting in the imaginative qualities which mark 
the liigher statesman, nor can Ave trace in his acts any sign of a 
creative faculty or any perception of new ideas. In politics as in 
war, or in his after-dealings with letters, he simply took what was 
closest at hand and made the best of it. The laws of Lai and Offa 
were codified and amended, justice was more rigidly administer- 
ed, corporal punishment was substituted in most cases for the old 
blood-wite or money-fine, and the right of private revenge was 
curtailed. The strong moral bent of ^Elfred's mind was seen in 
some of the novelties of his legislation. The Ten Commandments 
and a portion of the Law of Moses were prefixed to his code, and 
thus became part of the law of the land. Labor on Sundays and 
holy days was made criminal, and heavy punishments were exact- 
ed for sacrilege, perjury, and the seduction of nuns. Much of 
the success of his actual administration was due, no doubt, to his 
choice of instruments. He had a keen eye for men. Denewulf, 
the Bishop of Winchester, was said to have been a swine-herd in 
the forest when Alfred, struck with the quickness of his wit, took 
him home and reared him at his court. The story is a mere le- 
gend, but it conveys a popular impression of the King's rapid rec- 
ognition of merit in any station. He could hardly have chosen 
braver or more energetic coadjutors than those whom he employed 
both in his political and in his educational efforts. The two chil- 
dren whom he himself trained for rule, Eadward and ^thelflsed, 
proved the ablest rulers of their time. But the secret of his good 
government lay mainly in the intense energy of -zElfred himself. 

The spirit of adventure that made him in youth the first hunts- 
man of his day, the reckless daring of his early manhood, took 

8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



later and gvaver form in an activity that found time amid the 
cares of state for the daily duties of religion, for converse vs'ith 
strangers, for study and translation, for learning poems by heart, 
for planning buildings and instructing craftsmen in gold-work, for 
teaching even falconers and dog-keepers their business. Restless 
as he was, his activity was the activity of a mind strictly prac- 
tical. -iiElfred was pre-eminently a man of business, careful of de- 
tail, laborious, and methodical. He carried in his bosom a little 
hand-book, in which he jotted down things as they struck him; 
now a bit of family genealogy, now a prayer, now a story, such 
as that of Bishop Ealdhelm singing sacred songs on the bridge. 
Each hour of the King's day had its peculiar task ; there was the 
same order in the division of his revenue and in the arrangement 
of his court. But active and busy as he was, his temper remained 
simple and kindly. We have few stories of his life that are more 
than mere legends, but even legend itself never ventured to de- 
part from the outlines of a character which men knew so well. 
During his months of waiting at Athelney, while the country 
was overrun by the Danes, he was said to have entered a peas- 
ant's hut, and to have been bidden by the housewife, who did not 
recognize him, to turn the cakes which were baking on the hearth. 
The young King did as he was bidden, but in the sad thoughts 
which came over him he forgot his task, and bore in amused si- 
lence the scolding of the good wife, Avho found her cakes spoildd 
on her return. This tale, if nothing more than a tale, could nev- 
er have been told of a man without humor. Tradition told of his 
genial good-nature, of his chattiness over the adventures of his 
life, and above all of his love for song. In his busiest days JElfred 
found time to learn the old songs of his race by heart, and bade 
them be taught in the palace-school. As he translated the tales 
of the heathen mythology he lingered fondly over and expanded 
them, and in moments of gloom he found comfort in the music of 
the Psalms. 

Neither the wars nor the legislation of Alfred were destined to 
leave such lasting traces upon England as the impulse he gave to 
its literature. His end indeed even in this was practical rather 
than literary. What he aimed at was simply the education of his 
people. As yet Wessex was the most ignorant among the En- 
glish kingdoms. " When I began to reign," said Alfred, " I can 
not remember one south of Thames who could explain his service- 
book in English." Even in the more highly cultivated towns of 
Mercia and Northumbria the Danish sword had left few survivors 
of the school of Ecgberht or Bseda, To remedy this ignorance 
Alfred desired that at least every free-born youth who possessed 
the means should " abide at his book till he can well understand 
English writing." He himself superintended a school which he 
had established for the young nobles of his court. At home he 
found none to help him in his educational efforts but a few Mer- 
cian prelates and priests, with one Welsh bishop, Asser. "For- 
merly," the King writes bitterly, " men came hither from foreign 
lands to seek for instruction, and now Avhen we desire it we can 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



83 



only obtain it from abroad." But his mind was far from being 
prisoned within his own island. He sent a jSTorwegian ship-mas- 
ter to explore the White Sea, and Wulfstan to trace the coast of 
Esthonia ; envoys bore his presents to the churches of India and 
Jerusalem, and an annual mission carried Peter's-pence to Rome. 
It was with France, however, that his intercourse was closest, and 
it was from thence that he drew the scholars to aid him in his 
work of education. A scholar named Grimbald came from St. 
Omer to preside over the new abbey at Winchester; and John, 
the Old Saxon, was fetched from the abbey of Corbey to rule a 
monastery and school that Alfred's gratitude for his deliverance 
from the Danes raised in the marshes of Athelney. 

The real work, however, to be done was done not by these 
scholars, but by the King himself. Alfred resolved to throw open 
to his people in their own tongue the knowledge which had till 
then been limited to the clergy. He took his books as he found 
them — they were the popular manuals of his age — the Consola- 
tions of Boethius, the Pastorals of Pope Gregory, the compilation 
of Orosius, then the one accessible hand-book of universal history, 
and the history of his own people by Baeda. He translated these 
works into English, but he was far more than a translator, he was 
an editor for the people. Here he omitted, there he expanded. 
He enriched Orosius by a sketch of the new geographical discov- 
eries in the North. He gave a West-Saxon form to his selections 
from Bseda. In one place he stops to explain his theory of gov- 
ernment, his wish for a thicker population, his conception of na- 
tional welfare as consisting in a due balance of the priest, the sol- 
dier, and the churl. The mention of Nero spurs him to an out- 
break on the abuses of power. The cold Providence of Boethius 
gives way to an enthusiastic acknowledgment of the goodness of 
God. As he writes, his large-hearted nature flings off its royal 
mantle, and talks as a man to men. " Do not blame me," he prays, 
with a charming simplicity, "if any know Latin better than I, for 
every man must say what he says and do what he does according 
to his ability." But simple as was his aim, .Alfred created En- 
glish literature. Before him, England possessed in her own tongue 
one great poem, that of Csedmon, and a train of ballads and battle- 
songs. Prose she had none. The mighty roll of the books that 
fill her libraries begins with the translations of Alfred, and above 
all with the Chronicle of his reign. It seems likely that the King's 
rendering of Bseda's history gave the first impulse toward the com- 
pilation of what is known as the English or Anglo-Saxon Chron- 
icle, which was certainly thrown into its present form during his 
reign. The meagre lists of the kings of Wessex and of the bish- 
ops of Winchester, which had been preserved from older times, 
were roughly expanded into a national history by insertions from 
Bseda ; but it is when it reaches the reign of Alfred that the 
Chronicle suddenly widens into the vigorous narrative, full of life 
and originality, that marks the gift of a new power to the English 
tongue. Varying as it does from age to age in historic value, it 
remains the first vernacular history of any Teutonic people, the 



84 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



earliest and the most venerable monument of Teutonic prose. The 
writer of English history may be pardoned if he lingers too fond- 
ly over the figure of the king in whose court, at whose impulse, it 
may be in whose very words, English history begins. 



Section VI.— The "West-Sason Kealm, 892—1016. 

{Authorities. — Plainly the English Chronicle, which varies much during this peri- 
od. Through the reign of Eadward it is copious, and a Mei'cian chronicle is im- 
bedded in it ; its entries then become scanty, and are broken with grand English 
songs till the reign of JEthelred, when its fullness returns. "Florence of Worces- 
ter" is probably a translation of a copy of the Chronicle now lost. The "LaAvs" 
form the basis of our constitutional knowledge of the time, and fall into two classes. 
Those of Eadward, ^thelstan, Eadmund, and Eadgar are, like the earlier laws of 
-3]]thelberht and Ini, "mainly of the nature of amendments of custom." Those of 
iElfred,^thelred, Cnut, with those that bear the name of Eadward the Confessor, 
"aspire to the character of codes." All are printed in Mr. Thorpe's "Ancient Laws 
and Institutes of the Anglo-Saxons;" but the extracts given by Professor Stubbs 
("Documents illustrative of English History," pp. 59-74) contain all that directly 
bears on our constitution. Mr. Kemble's "Codex Diplomaticus ^vi Saxonici" con- 
tains a vast mass of charters, etc., belonging to this period. The lives of Dunstau 
are given by Mabillon, and in the Bollandist "Acta Sanctorum" for May 19th.] 



The brunt of the invasion which at last broke under the Dan- 
ish leader Hasting upon England fell mainly on the brave eald'or- 
raan whom the King had set over Mercia. After a year's fruit- 
less struggle to force the strong position in which Alfred covered 
Wessex, Hasting left his fastness in the And reds wald and cross- 
ed the Thames. But the energy of the Mercian leader was even 
more formidable than the patient strategy of the King. Follow- 
ed by the Londoners, ^thelred stormed the Danish camp at Ben- 
fleet, followed the host as it rode along Thames to rouse new re- 
volts in Wales, caught it at Buttington, and defeated it with a 
great slaughter. Falling back on Essex, Hasting repeated his 
dash upon the west, but JEthelred drove him from his hold at 
Chester, and hung on his rear as he retreated to his camp on the 
Lee. Here Alfred, free from all danger in Wessex, came to his 
lieutenant's aid, and the capture of the Danish ships hy the two 
forts with which the King barred the river virtually ended the 
war. The Danes streamed back from Wales, whither they had 
retreated, to their old quarters in France, and the new English 
fleet drove the freebooters from the Channel. 

The death of -Alfred and ^thelred soon followed these exploits, 
but the fame of Mercia was safe in the hands of its "Lady," the 
daughter of jElfred,^thelfla3d. During a few years of peace she 
girded her strength for the conquest of the " Five Boroughs," the 
rude Danish confederacy which had taken the place of the older 
Mercian kingdom. Derby represented the original Mercia in the 
upper Trent, Lincoln the Lindiswaras, Leicester the Middle-En- 
glish, Stamford the province of the Gyrwas — the marshmen of 
the Fens — Nottingham probably that of the Southumbrians. The 
realm of Penda had become strongly Danish ; each of the " Bor- 



!•] 



TRE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



85 



oughs" seems to have been ruled by its earl with his separate 
"host;" within, twelve "lawmen" administered Danish law, while 
a common justice-court existed for the whole confederacy. In her 
attack on their powei'ful league ^thelflsed abandoned the older 
strategy of battle and raid for that of siege and fortress-building. 
Advancing along the line of Trent, she had fortified Tamworth 
and Stafford on its head waters, when a rising in Gwent called her 
back to the Welsh border. Her army stormed Brecknock; and 
Owain, its king, no sooner fled for shelter to the Danes, in whose 
aid he had risen, than ^thelflsed at once closed on Derby. The 
raids of the Danes of Middle-England failed to draw the Lady 
of Mercia from her prey; and Derby was hardly her own when, 
turning southward, she forced the surrender of Leicester. 

^thelflaad died in the midst of her triumphs, and Eadward at 
once annexed his sister's dominions. The brilliancy of her ex- 
ploits had as yet eclipsed his own, but the son of -Alfred was a 
vigorous and active ruler; he had repulsed a dangerous inroad of 
the IsTorthmen from France, summoned no doubt by the cry of 
distress from their brethren in England, and had bridled East-An- 
glia to the South by the erection of forts at Hertford and Witham. 
He now undertook the systematic reduction of the Danelagh, as 
the district occupied by the Danes began to be called. South 
of the Middle-English and the Fens lay a tract watered by the 
Ouse and the Nen — oi'iginally the district of a tribe known as the 
South -English, and now, like the Five Boroughs of the North, 
grouped round the towns of Bedford, Huntingdon, and ISTorth- 
ampton. The reduction of these was followed by that of East- 
Anglia ; the Danes of the Fens submitted with Stamford, the 
Southumbrians with IsTottingham. Eadward's Mercian troops had 
already seized Manchester, he himself was preparing to complete 
his conquests, when the whole of the North suddenly laid itself at 
his feet. Not merely Northumbria, but the Scots and the Britons 
of Strathclyde, " chose him to father and lord." The submission 
had probably been brought about, like that of the North- Welsh 
to Alfred, by the pressure of mutual feuds, and it was as value- 
less as theirs. Within a year after Eadward's death the North 
was again on fire, -^thelstan, Alfred's golden-haired grandson, 
whom the King had girded as a child with a sword set in a golden 
scabbai-d and a gem-studded belt, incorporated Northumbria with 
his dominions ; then turning westward broke a league which had 
been formed between the North-Welsh and the Scots, forced them 
to pay annual tribute, to march in his armies, and to attend his 
councils. The West- Welsh of Cornwall were reduced to a like 
vassalage, and finally driven from Exeter, which they had shared 
till then with its English inhabitants. The revolt of the King 
of the Scots, Constantino, was punished by an army which wasted 
his kingdom, while a fleet ravaged its coasts to Caithness. But 
the revolt only heralded the formidable confederacy in which 
Scotland, Cumberland, and the British and Danish chiefs of the 
West and East rose at the appearance of the fleet of Anlaf in the 
II umber. The King's victory at Brunanburh, sung in noblest war- 



Seo. VI. 

The Wbst- 
Saxon 

Realm. 
892- 

1016. 

JEthelflced, 

the Lady of 

the Merciaiii. 

913-91S. 



"Wessex 

and tlie 

Daiielagli. 

Eadward the 

Elder. 

901—925. 



JEthelstati. 
925—940. 



Brnnan- 
hurh . 
937. 



86 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



song, seemed the wreck of Danish hopes, but the work of conquest 
was still to be done. On -^thelstan's death, the Danelagh rose 
again in revolt ; and though the young King Eadmund won back 
the Five Boroughs, the peace which was negotiated by the two 
archbishops, Oda and Wulfstan, restored the old balance of Al- 
fred's day, and re-established Watling Street as the boundary be- 
tween Wessex and the Danes. 

The completion of the West-Saxon realm was in fact reserved 
for the hands, not of a king or warrior, but of a priest. Dunstan 
stands first in the line of ecclesiastical statesmen who counted 
among them Lanfranc and Wolsey, and ended in Laud. He is 
still more remarkable in himself, in his own vivid personality 
after eight centuries of revolution and change. He was born in 
the little hamlet of Glastonbury, beside Ini's church; his father, 
Heorstan, was a man of wealth, and brother of the bishops of 
Wells and of Winchestei". It must have been in his father's hall 
that the fair, diminutive boy, with his scant but beautiful hair, 
caught his charm over animals, his love for " the vain songs of 
ancient heathendom, the trifling legends, the funeral chants," 
which afterward roused against him the charge of sorcery. 
Thence, too, he may have derived his passionate love of music, 
and his custom of carrying his harp in hand on journey or visit. 
The wandering scholars of Ireland had left their books in tlie 
monastery of Glastonbury, as they left them along the Khine aild 
the Danube ; and Dunstan plunged into the study of sacred and 
profane letters till his brain broke down in delirium. His knowl- 
edge became famous in the neighborhood and reached the court 
of the King, but his appearance there was the signal for a burst 
of ill-will among the courtiers, many of whom were probably kins- 
men of his own. They drove him from the King's train, threw 
him from his horse as he passed through the marshes; and, with 
the wild passion of their age, trampled him underfoot in the mire. 
The outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from his sick-bed a 
monk. But his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature was 
sunny, versatile, artistic ; full of strong affections, and capable of 
inspiring others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, of te- 
nacious memory, a ready and fluent speaker, gay and genial in ad- 
dress, an artist, a musician, he was at the same time an indefat- 
igable worker, busy at books, at building, at handicraft. His mo- 
nastic profession seems to have been little more than a vow of 
celibacy. Throughout his manhood he won the affection of wom- 
en ; he now became the chaplain and guide of a woman of high 
rank, who lived only for charity and the entertainment of pil- 
grims. " He ever clave to her, and loved her in wondrous fash- 
ion." The wealth of his devotee was placed unreservedly at his 
command ; his sphere began to wnden ; we see him followed by a 
train of pupils, busy with literature, writing, harping, painting, 
designing. One morning a lady summons him to her house to de- 
sign a robe which she is embroidering. As he bends with her 
maidens over their toil, his harp hung upon the wall sounds with- 
out mortal touch tones which the excited ears around frame into 



L] 



TEE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



87 



a joyous antiphon. The tie which bound him to this scholar-life 
was broken by the death of his patroness, and Dunstan was sud- 
denly called to a wider sphere of activity by the accession of 
Eadmund. But the old jealousies revived at his re-appearance 
at court, and counting the game lost Dunstan prepared again to 
withdraw. The King had spent the day in the chase ; the red 
deer which he was pursuing dashed over Cheddar cliffs, and his 
horse only checked itself on the brink of the ravine while Ead- 
mund in the bitterness of death was repenting of his injustice to 
Dunstan. He was at once summoned on the King's return. 
" Saddle your horse," said Eadmund, " and ride with me." The 
royal train swept over the marshes to his home ; and the King, be- 
stowing on him the kiss of peace, seated him in the priestly chair 
as Abbot of Glastonbury. 

The hand of the new minister was soon seen in the settlement 
of the North. He seized on the Scots as a balance to the Danes, 
and secured the aid of their king by investing him with the fief 
of Cumberland. Northumbria at once fell into Eadmund's hands, 
and submitted peaceably at his death to his brother Eadred. A 
revolt two years later enabled Dunstan to fling the head of the 
Danish resistance, the Archbishop of York, Wulstan, into prison, 
and to depose him from his see, while the Northumbrian realm 
sank into an earldom under Oswulf On Eadgar's accession, the 
minister hastened to complete his work. The great earldom was 
broken into three portions ; Oswulf retained the central part be- 
tween Tees and Tweed, which appropriated to itself the larger title 
of the whole ; Deira, revived for Earl Oslac, became our York- 
shire. The Scot king, Kenneth, already secured by the grant of 
Cumberland, was now probably bound to the English supremacy 
by the grant of Northern Northumbria, the county between the 
Forth and the Tweed. The grant was more important in its bear- 
ing on the history of Scotland than on our own. Lothian became 
the chief abode of its new rulers, Edinburgh their capital. The 
Scot kings were absorbed into the mass of their English subjects, 
and renounced their old Gaelic for the English tongue. But the 
settlement of the North already indicated the large and statesman- 
like course which Dunstan Avas to pursue in the general adminis- 
tration of the realm. He seems to have adopted from the begin- 
ning a national rather than a West - Saxon policy. The charge 
against his later rule, that he gave too much power to the Dane 
and too much love to strangers, is the best proof of the unprovin- 
cial temper of his administration. In the code which he promul- 
gated he expressly reserved to the North its old Danish rights, 
" with as good laws as they best might choose." The resentment 
of Wessex was seen in the revolution which followed on the death 
of Eadred. His successor, Eadwig, had contracted an uncanonical 
marriage ; he added to the irritation of the prelates by withdraw- 
ing to his queen's chamber in the midst of the coronation feast. 
Dunstan, commissioned by the bishops and nobles, drew him 
roughly into the hall. The wrath of the boy-king drove the abbot 
over-sea, and his whole system went with him. The kingdom at 



88 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



once broke up; Mercia and Xorthumbria cast off the rule of 
Wessex, and chose Eadgar, the brother of Eadwig, for their king. 

Dunstan was recalled by the Mercian Witeuagemot, and re- 
ceived from Eadgar the sees of London and Winchester. When 
the scandals of Eadwig's misgoverument ended two years after in 
his death, Wessex submitted to the king who had been already 
accepted by the North, and Dunstan, now raised to the see of Can- 
terbury, wielded for sixteen years as the minister of Eadgar the 
secular and ecclesiastical powers of the realm. Never had En- 
gland seemed so strong or so peaceful. We have already noticed 
the settlement of the North ; without, a fleet cruising round the 
coast reduced the Danes of Ireland beneath the English overlord- 
ship ; eight vassal kings rowed Eadgar after his coronation in his 
boat on the Dee. The death of King Eadmund had shown the in- 
ternal disorder of the state. As the King feasted at Pucklechurch, 
a robber, Leofa, whom he had banished, sat himself at the royal 
board and di-ew on the cup-bearer, who bade him retire. Ead- 
mund, springing to his thegn's aid, seized the robber by his hair 
and flung him to the ground, but Leofa had stabbed the King ere 
rescue could arrive. The stern hand of Dunstan restored justice 
and order, while his care for commerce was shown in the laws 
which regulated the monetary standard and the enactments of 
common weights and measures for the realm. Thanet was rav- 
aged when the wreckers of its coast plundered a trading ship from 
York. But the aims of the Primate-minister reached far beyond 
this outer revival of prosperity and good government. Time and 
the Northern war had dealt rudely with u^lfred's hopes ; his edu- 
cational movement had ceased with his death, the clergy had sunk 
back into worldliness and ignorance ; not a single book or transla- 
tipn had been added to those which the King had left. Dunstan 
resumed the task, if not in the larger spirit of JElfred, at least in 
the spirit of a great administrator. He had long sympathized 
with the revival of the stricter monasticism which had begun in 
the abbey of Clugny, and he now devoted himself to its introduc- 
tion into the English cloisters. He found vigorous aid in Oswald 
and ^thelwold, whom he had promoted to the sees of York and 
Winchester; a dream showed him a tree of wondrous height 
stretching its branches over Britain, its boughs loaded with count- 
less cowls, the topmost twig crowned with a cowl of larger size 
than all. The tree — Dunstan interpreted — was England as it was 
to be, the big cowl ^thelwold. The three prelates pushed the 
movement roughly forward, expelling the secular canons from 
many of the cathedrals, and founding forty new abbeys. The ab- 
beys were schools as well as monasteries. Dunstan himself while 
Abbot was famous as a teacher, JEthelwold raised Abingdon into 
a school second only to Glastonbury. Abbo, the most notable 
scholar in Gaul, came from Fleury at the Primate's invitation. 

After-times looked back fondly to " Eadgar's Law," as it was 
called, in other words to the English Constitution as it shaped it- 
self in the hands of Eadgar's minister. Peace and change had 
greatly modified the older order which had followed on the En- 



!•] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



89 



glisli Conquest. Slavery was gradually disappearing before the 
efforts of the Church. Theodore had denied Christian burial to 
the kidnaper, and prohibited the sale of children by their parents 
after the age of seven. Ecgberht of York punished any sale of 
child or kinsfolk with excommunication. Tlie murder of a slave 
by lord or mistress, though no crime in the eye of the state, be- 
came a sin for which penance was due to the Church. The slave 
was exempted from toil on Sundays and holy days ; here and there 
he became attached to the soil, and could only be sold with it ; 
sometimes he acquired a plot of ground, and was suffered to pur- 
chase his own release. -5Cthelstan gave the slave-class a new rank 
in the realm by extending to it the same principles of mutual re- 
sponsibility for crime which were the basis of order among the 
free. The Church was far from contenting herself with this grad- 
ual elevation ; Wilfrith led the way in the work of emancipation 
by freeing two hundi-ed and fifty serfs whom he found attached 
to his estate at Selsey. Manumission became frequent in wills, as 
the clergy taught that such a gift was a boon to the soul of the 
dead. At the Svnod of Calcuith the bishops bound themselves 
to free at their decease all serfs on their estates who had been re- 
duced to serfdom by want or crime. Usually the slave was set 
free before the altar or in the church-poi'ch, and the Gospel-book 
bore written on its margins the record of his emancipation. Some- 
times his lord placed him at the spot where four roads met, and 
bade him go whither he would. In the more solemn form of the 
law his master took him by the hand in full shire-meeting, showed 
him open road and door, and gave him the lance and sword of the 
freeman. The slave-trade from English ports was prohibited by 
law, but the prohibition long remained ineffective. A hundred 
years later than Dunstan the wealth of English nobles was said 
sometimes to spring from breeding slaves for the market. It was 
not till the reign of the first Norman king that the preaching of 
Wulstari and the influence of Lanfranc suppressed the trade in its 
last stronghold, the port of Bristol. 

But the decrease of slavery was more than compensated by the 
increasing degradation of the bulk of the people. Much, indeed, 
of the dignity of the free farmer had depended on the contrast of 
his position with that of the slave ; free among his equals, he was 
lord among his serfs. But the change from freedom to villenage, 
from the freeholder who knew no superior but God and the law 
to the tenant bound to do service to his lord, which was annihila- 
ting the old English liberty in the days of Dunstan, was owing 
mainly to a change in the character of English kingshipi. The 
union of the English realms had removed the King, as his domin- 
ions extended, further and further from his people, and clothed 
him with a mysterious dignity. Religion had told against polit- 
ical independence. With jElfred the King becomes " the Lord's 
anointed," treason against him is punished with death ; even the 
bishop, once his equal in life-value, sinks to the level of the ealdor- 
man. The ealdorman himself, once the hereditary ruler of a small- 
er state, becomes from Alfred's time the mere delegate of the 



SEa vi. 

The West- 
Saxon 
RealIh. 
892- 
1016. 



Decline of 
slavery. 



The later 
kingdom. 



Tlie King. 



90 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



King ; his authority is curtailed by that of the royal reeves, offi- 
cers dispatched to levy the royal revenues and administer the 
royal justice. The older nobility of blood died out before the 
new nobility of the court. From the oldest times of Germanic 
history each chief or king had his war-band, his comrades, war- 
riors bound personally to him by their free choice, sworn to fight 
for him to the death, and avenge his cause as their own. When 
Cynewulf of Wessex was foully slain at Merton his comrades 
" ran at once to the spot, each as he was ready and as fast as he 
could," and despising all offers of life, fell fighting over the corpse 
of their lord. The fidelity of the Avar-band was rewarded with 
grants from the royal domain ; the King became their lord or hla- 
ford, "the dispenser of gifts;" the comrade became his "servant" 
or thegn. Personal service with such a lord was held not to 
degrade, but to ennoble; " dish-thegn," and "bower-thegn," and 
"horse-thegn," became great officers of state. The older nobility 
were gradually supplanted by the new ; the thegn advanced with 
the advance of the King ; he absorbed every post of honor, and 
became ealdorraan, reeve, bishop, judge ; while the common ground 
of the mark now became folk-land in the hands of the King, and 
was carved out into estates for his dependents. 

With the advance of the thegn fell the freedom of the peasant. 
The principle of personal allegiance embodied in the new nobility 
widened into a theory of general dependence. By Alfred's day 
it was assumed that no man could exist without a lord. The rav- 
ages and the long insecurity of the Danish wars aided to drive the 
free farmer to seek protection from the thegn. His freehold was 
surrendered to be received back as a fief, laden with service to 
its lord. Gradually the " lordless man" became a sort of outlaw in 
the realm. The free churl sank into the villein, and with his per- 
sonal freedom went his share in the government of the state. 
Every freeman was his own legislator, in the meeting of the mark, 
or of the shire, or of the kingdom. In each the preliminary dis- 
cussion rested with the nobler sort, the final decision with all. 
The clash of arms, the " yea" or " nay" of the crowd, were its vote. 
The union of the different kingdoms seemed only to widen and 
exalt the power of the English freeman, for he was by right a 
member of the "great meeting" as of the smaller, and in that "as- 
sembly of the wise" lay the rule of the realm. It could elect or 
depose the King. The higher justice, the imposition of taxes, the 
making of laws, the conclusion of treaties, the control of Avar, the 
disposal of public lands, the appointment of great officers of state, 
belonged to the Great Assembly. But with this power the free- 
man had really less and less to do. The larger the kingdom the 
greater grew the distance from his home. His part in the shire- 
moot was necessarily less than in his own mark-moot ; his share 
in the general deliberations of the realm dwindled to nothing. 
There was no election of delegates ; the freeman appeared in per- 
son or not at all. The only relic of the popular character of En- 
glish government lay at last in the ring of citizens who at London 
or Winchester gathered round the Wise Men and shouted their 



I-] 



TEE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



" aye" or " nay" at the election of a king. Practically the nation- 
al council shrank into a gathering of the great officers of Church 
and State with the royal thegns, and the old English democracy 
passed into an oligarchy of the closest kind. 

It is in this degradation of the class in which its true strength 
lay, that we must look for the cause of the ruin which already 
hung over the West-Saxon realm. Fresh virulence was added to 
the reaction against the system of Dunstan by his rough treat- 
ment of the married clergy, and the violent transfer of property 
which his measures necessitated. For a time the discontent was 
quelled by the energy of the primate; seizing his cross, he settled 
the dispute over Eadgar's successor by the coronation of his son 
Eadward, and confronted his enemies successfully in three assem- 
blies of the Wise. In that of Calne the floor of the room gave 
way, and Dunstan and his friends alone remained unhurt. But 
not even the fame of a miracle sufficed to turn the tide. The as- 
sassination of Eadward was followed by a West-Saxon triumph, 
and the thegns of the south broke out in "great joy" at the cor- 
onation of hiB brother -iEthelred. Dunstan withdrew to die at 
Canterbury, and with his withdrawal the artificial kingdom which 
his genius had built up fell at once to the ground. All hope of 
national union was ruined by the selfish provincialism of Wessex. 
The immediate resumption of Danish hostilities, the practical se- 
cession of the North, followed naturally on the accession of ^thel- 
red. Within, the new king was at war with his clergy and with 
Mercia, ravaging the see of Rochester, and driving -^Ifric, the eal- 
dorman of the former province, into temporary banishment. Ex- 
ecrated as traitors by the West-Saxons and their king, the Mercian 
earls seemed to have aimed at the restoration of the old political 
balance, perhaps at the revival of the yet older independence which 
Wessex had swept away. Weakened by the ceaseless attacks of 
the Danes, ^thelred was forced by their coalition with the cler- 
ical party under Archbishop Sigeric, the inheritor of the policy 
of Danstan, to buy a truce from the invaders and to sufier them 
to settle peacefully in the land. A fresh attempt to expel them 
threw JElfric openly into their arms, and the kingdom of JEthel- 
red shrank into the realms of Wessex and Kent. On these through 
five vears fell the full fury of the Danish onset, till peace was again 
3d by a heavy bribe, and by a, promise to afford pay and 
lice to the Northmen who chose to settle in Wessex. But 
ie only served as a screen for the basest treachery. Urged 
t orders from the King, the West-Saxons rose on St. Brice's 
\ pitilessly massacred the Danes scattered defenselessly 
hem. The tower of St. Frideswide, in which those of Ox- 
taken refuge, was burned with them to the gi'ound. Gun- 
sister of their King Swegen, a Christian convert, and one 
ostages for the peace, saw husband and child butchered 
5r eyes ere she fell, threatening vengeance on her murder- 
egen swore at the news to wrest England from ^thelred. 
years he marched through the length and- breadth of 
"lighting his war-beacons as he went" in blazino- home- 



Si 

TheN 
Saxl 
Realm. 
892- 
1016. 

Fall of 
the West- 
Saxon 
Kingdom. 



Eadivard the 
Martyr. 
9T5— 9T8. 



JEthelred the 
Unready. 
979— lOiO. 



99T— 1002. 



Massacre of 
Danes. 
1002. 



looo-ioor. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



(Vest- 

AXON 
.{EALM. 

892- 
1016. 

1011. 



stead and town. Then for a heavy bribe he withdrew, to prepare 
for a later and more terrible onset. But there was no rest for 
the realm. The fiercest of the Norwegian jarls took his place, and 
from Wessex the war extended over Mercia and East-Anglia. 
Canterbury was taken and sacked, ^Ifheah the Archbishop drag- 
ged to Greenwich, and there, in default of ransom, brutally slain. 
The Danes set him in the midst of their busting, pelting him with 
bones and skulls of oxen, till one more pitiful than the rest clove 
his skull with an axe. 

It was not so much the imbecility of ^thelred which paralyzed 
the struggle against the Danes as the practical secession of En- 
gland north of the Thames, and v/hen this Northern England pass- 
ed from inactivity to active effort the struggle was over in a mo- 
ment. Northumbria and Mercia at last threw themselves with 
Swegen on Wessex. The war was terrible but short. Every- 
where the country was pitilessly harried, churches plundered, 
men slaughtered. But, with the one exception of London, there 
was no attempt at resistance. Oxford and Winchester flung open 
their gates. The thegns of Wessex submitted to the Northmen 
at Bath. Even London was forced at last to give way, and ^thel- 
red fled over the sea to a refuge in Normandy. With the flight 
of the King ends the long struggle of Wessex for supremacy over 
Britain. The task which had baffled the energies of Eadwiue and 
Offa proved too hard for the valor of Eadward and the statesman- 
shijj of Dunstan. Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria remained 
separate political bodies which no efforts of force or policy seemed 
able to fuse into one. 



IL] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



93 



CHAPTER II. 

ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 

1013—1042. 

Section I.— The Danisli Kings. 

[Authorities. — We are still aided by the collections of royal laws and charters. 
The English Chronicle is here of great importance ; its various copies differ much 
in tone, etc., from one another, and may to some extent be regarded as distinct 
works. Florence of Worcester is probably the translator of a valuable copy of the 
Chronicle which has disappeared. The authority of the contemporary biographer 
of Eadward (in Luard's " Lives of Eadward the Confessor," published by the Master 
of the Eolls) is "primary, "says Mr. Freeman, "for all matters strictly personal to 
the King and the whole family of Godwine. He is, however, very distinctly not an 
historian, but a biographer, sometimes a laureate." All modern accounts of this 
reign have been superseded by the elaborate history of Mr. Freeman (Norman Con- 
quest, vol. ii.).] 

Britaest had become England in the five hundred years that fol- 
lowed the landing of Hengest, and its conquest had ended in the 
settlement of its conquerors, in their conversion to Christianity, in 
the birth of a national literature, of an imperfect civilization, of a 
rough political order. But through the whole of this earlier age 
every attempt to fuse the various tribes of conquerors into a single 
nation had failed. The effort of Northumbria to extend her rule 
over all England had been foiled by the resistance of Mercia, that 
of Mercia by the resistance of JiVessex. Wessex itself, even under 
the guidance of great kings^ancTstitesmen, had no sooner reduced 
the country to a seeming unity than local independence rose again 
at the call of the Danes. The tide of supremacy rolled in fact 
backward and forward ; now the South won lordship over the 
North, now the North won lordship over the South. But whatev- 
er titles kings might assume, or however imposing their rule might 
appear, Northumbrian remained apart from West - Saxon, Dane 
from Englishman. A common national sympathy held the coun- 
try roughly together, but a real national union had yet to come. 

Through the two hundred years that lie between the flight of 
iEthelred from England to Normandy and that of John from Nor- 
mandy to England our story is a story of foreign rule. Kings 
from Denmark were succeeded by kings from Normandy, and 
these by kings from Anjou. Under Dane, Norman, or Angevin, 
Englishmen were a subject race, conquered and ruled by foreign 
masters, and yet it was in these years of slavery that England re- 
ally became the England that we know. Provincial differences were 
crushed into national unity by the pressure of the stranger. The 



94 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



same pressure redressed the wrong which had been done to the 
fabric of national society by the degradation of the free farmer at 
the close of the preceding age into a feudal dependent on his lord. 
The English lord himself was pushed from his place by the barons 
of the Conquest, and sank into the position from which he had 
thrust the churl. The middle class, thus created, was re-enforced 
by the rise of a similar class in our towns ; commerce and trade 
were promoted by the justice and policy of the kings, and with 
their progress rose the political importance of the trader. The 
boroughs of England, which at the opening of this period were for 
the most part mere villages, were rich enough at its close to buy 
liberty from the Crown. Rights of self-government, of free speech, 
of common deliberation, which had jjassed under the latter rule of 
our English sovereigns from the people at large into the hands of 
its nobles, and from them at the Conquest into the hands of the 
Crown, revived in the charters and councils of the towns. A mor- 
al revival followed hard on this political development. The occu- 
pation of every see and abbacy by strangers who could only speak 
to their flocks in an unknown tongue converted religion from a su- 
perstition into a reality as it passed from the priest to the people, 
and hermit and friar carried spiritual life home to the heart of the 
nation at large. At the same time the close connection with the 
Continent which necessarily resulted from the foreign origin of oUr 
sovereigns secured for their realm a free communion with the in- 
tellectual and artistic life of the world around. The old mental 
stagnation was at once broken up, and art and literature covered 
England with great buildings and busy schools. Time for this va- 
ried progress was gained by the long peace wliich England owed 
to the firm government of her kings, while their political ability 
gave her administrative order, and their judicial reforms built up 
the fabric of her law. In a word, it is to the stern discipline of 
these two hundred years that we owe not merely English wealth 
and English freedom, but England itself. 

The first of our foreign masters was the Dane. The countries of 
Scandinavia which had so long been the mere starting-points of the 
pirate-bands who had ravaged England and Ireland were now settling 
down into comparative order. It was the aim of Swend to unite 
them in a great Scandinavian Empire, of which England should be the 
head, and this project, interrupted for a time by his death, was re- 
sumed with yet greater vigor by his son. The fear of the Dane was 
still great in the land, and Cnut had no sooner appeared off the En- 
glish coast than the Wise Men of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumber- 
land joined in owning him for their lord, and in discarding again the 
rule of ^thelred, who had returned on the death of Swend, With 
the sole su'pportrof London and part of Wessex, and for a time that 
of Mercia, Eadmund Ironside, the son and successor of ^thelred, 
who passed away at the opening of the new contest, struggled for 
a few months against the Danish forces ; but a decisive victory at 
Assandun and the death of hi^TTval left Cnut master of the realm. 
Conqueror as he was, the Dane was no foreigner in the sense that 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



95 



the N'orman was a foreigner after Lira. His language differed lit- 
tle from the English tongue. He brought in no new system of 
tenure or government. Cnut ruled, in fact, not as a conqueror but 
as a king. The good-will and tranquillity of England were neces- 
sary, in fact, for the success of his larger schemes in the North, 
Avhere the arms of his English subjects aided him in uniting Den- 
mark, Norway, and Sweden beneath his sway. Dismissing there- 
fore his Danish " host," and retaining only a trained body of house- 
hold troops, the hus-carls, who form the origin of our standing 
army, Cnut boldly relied for suf)port within his realm on the justice 
and good government he had secured it. His aim during twenty 
years seems to have been to obliterate from men's minds the for- 
eign character of his rule, and the bloodshed in which it had begun. 
The change in himself was as startling as the change in his policy. 
When he first appears in England, it is as the mere Northman, 
passionate, revengeful, uniting the guile of the savage with his 
thirst for blood. His first acts of government were a series of 
murders. Eadric of Mercia, whose aid had given him the crown, 
was no sooner useless than at a sign from Cnut he was felled by an 
ax(3-blow in the King's presence. A similar assassination removed 
Eadwig, the brother of Eadmund Ironside. Ironside himself was 
believed to have been poisoned by the King's agents, while his 
children were hunted even into Hungary by his ruthless hate. 
From a mere savage such as this Cnut rose abruptly into the wise 
and temperate king. Stranger as he was, he deliberately fell back 
on the older policy of Dunstan ; and while restoring " Eadgar's 
law," the constitution which secured a separate political existence 
to North and South alike, he acknowledged no difference between 
conqueror and conquered, between Dane and Englishman. By the 
erection of four earldoms, those of Mercia, Northumberland, Wes- 
sex, and East Anglia, he recognized provincial independence, but 
he drew closer than of old the ties which bound the rulers of these 
great dependencies to the Crown. His attitude toward national 
feeling was yet nobler. The Church had been the centre of nation- 
al resistance to the Dane, but Cnut sought above all its friendship. 
He paid homage to the cause for which ^Ifheah had died, by his 
translation of the archbishoja's body to Canterbury. He atoned 
for his father's ravages by costly gifts to the religious houses. He 
protected English pilgrims against the robber -lords of the Alps, 
and English bishops against the exactions of the Papacy. His love 
for the monks broke out in the song which he composed as he list- 
ened to their chant at Ely : " Merrily sung the monks of Ely when 
Cnut King rov/ed by" across the vast fen-waters that surrounded 
their abbey. " Row, boatman, near the land, and hear we these 
monks sing." 

Cnut's letter from Rome to his English subjects marks the grand- 
eur of his cliaracter, and the noble conception he had formed of 
kingship. " I have vowed to God to lead a right life in all things," 
\vrote the King ; " to rule justly and piously my realms and subjects, 
and to administer just judgment to all. If heretofore I have done 



98 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Seo. I. 

The Dakish 
Kings. 
1013- 
1042. 



England 

at peace. 



The Forest 
Laws. 



Fall of 
the Dan- 
ish rule. 



aught beyond what was just, through headiness or negligence of 
youth, I am ready, with God's help, to amend it utterly." IsTo roy- 
al officer, either for fear of the King or for favor of any, is to con- 
sent to injustice; none is to do wrong to rich or poor, "as they 
would value my friendship and their own well-being." He espe- 
cially denounces unfair exactions : " I have no need that money be 
heaped together for me by unjust demands." "I have sent this 
letter before me," Cnut ends, " that all the people of my realm may 
rejoice in my well-doing ; for as you yourselves know, never have 
I spared, nor will I spare, to spend myself and my toil in what is 
■needful and good for my people." 

Cnut's greatest gift to his people was that of peace. With him 
began the long internal tranquillity which marked the rule of our 
foreign masters. During two hundred years, with the one terrible 
interval of the ISTorman Conquest, and the long disturbance under 
Stephen, England alone among the kingdoms of Europe enjoyed 
unbroken repose. The wars of her kings lay far from her shores, 
in France or Normandy, or, as with Cnut, in the more distant lands 
of the North, The stern justice of their government secured order 
within. The absence of internal discontent under Cnut, perhaps 
too the exhaustion of the kingdom after the terrible Danish inroads, 
is proved by its quiet during his frequent periods of absence. Even 
the oppressive Forest Laws, which he was probably the first to en- 
act, witness indirectly to the growing wealth and prosperity. The 
greater part of English soil was still utterly uncultivated. A good 
third of the land was probably covered with wood, thicket, or 
scrub; another third consisted of heaths and moor. In both the 
East and the West there were vast tracts of marsh land; fens 
nearly one hundred miles long severed East-Anglia from the mid- 
land counties ; sites like that of Glastonbury or Athelney were al- 
most inaccessible. The bustard roamed over the downs, the beaver 
still haunted Beverley, huntsmen roused the bear in its forest lair, 
the London craftsmen chased the wild boar and the wild ox in the 
woods of Ilampstead, while wolves prowled round the homesteads 
of the North. Cnut's Law proves that peace, and the industry it 
encouraged, were already telling on this waste. Protection for the 
" wild deer" could only be thought of when stag and bittern were 
retreating before the face of rnan, when the farmer's axe was ring- 
ing in the forest, and villages springing up in the clearings. 

But the King lost more than his hunting as the forest shrank 
into narrower bounds. He lost power. The common law ran only 
where the plow ran. Marsh and moor and M-oodland knew no 
master but the King, no law but his absolute will; and Cnut was 
the first to embody this will in the written form of the "Forest 
Law." 

His code began a struggle between king and people, which we 
shall see raging through two centuries of our history, but it began 
it unconsciously. Cnut's one aim was to win the love of his peo- 
ple, and all tradition shows how wonderful was his success. . Bat 
the Danish rule ended with his death. Denmark and England, 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOBEIGN KINGS. 



97 



parted for a few years by the accession of his son Harold to the 
throne of the last, were reunited under a second son, Harthacnut ; 
but the love which Cnut's justice had won turned to hatred be- 
fore the lawlessness of his successors. The long peace sickened 
men of this fresh outburst of bloodshed and violence. " Never was 
a bloodier deed done in the land since the Danes came," ran the 
popular song, when Harold's men seized Alfred, the brother of 
Eadmund Ironside, who had attacked England from Normandy. 
Every tenth man was killed, the rest sold for slaves, and Alfred's 
eyes torn out at Ely. Harthacnut, more savage even than his 
predecessor, dug up his brother's body and flung it into a marsh ; 
while a rising at Worcester against his hus-carls was punished by 
the burning of the town and the pillage of the shire. His death 
was no less brutal than his life ; " he died as he stood at his drink 
in the house of Osgod Clapa at Lambeth." England wearied of 
kings like these; but their crimes helped her to free herself from 
the impossible dream of Cnut. The North, still more barbarous 
than herself, could give her no new element of progress or civiliza- 
tion. It was the consciousness of this, and the hatred of such 
rulers as Harold and Harthacnut, which co-operated with the old 
feelings of reverence for the past in calling back the line of -Alfred 
to the throne. 

Section II.— The English Kestoration, 1042—1066. 

It is in such transitional moments of a nation's history as this 
that it needs the cool prudence, the sensitive selfishness, the quick 
perception of what is possible, which distinguished the adroit poli- 
tician whom the death of Cnut left supreme in England. Godwine 
is memorable in our history as the first English statesman who was 
neither king nor priest. Originally of obscure origin, his ability 
had raised him high in the royal favor ; he was allied to the King 
by marriage, and intrusted by him with the earldom of Wessex. 
In the wars of Scandinavia he had shown courage and skill at the 
head of a body of English troops who supported Cnut, but his true 
field of action lay at home. Shrewd, eloquent, an active adminis- 
trator, Godwine united vigilance, industry, and caution with a sin- 
gular dexterity in the management of men. During the troubled 
years that followed the death of Cnut he had done his best to con- 
tinue his master's policy in securing the internal union of England 
under a Danish sovereign and in preserving her connection with 
the North. But at the death of Harthacnut Cnut's policy had 
become impossible, and abandoning the Danish cause Godwine 
drifted with the tide of popular feeling which called Eadward to 
the throne. 

Eadward the son of -^thelred had lived from his youth in exile 
at the court of Normandy. A halo of tenderness spread in after- 
time round this last King of the old English stock ; legends told of 
his pious simplicity, his blitheness and gentleness of mood, the holi- 
ness that gained him his name of " Confessor," and enshrined him 

7 



Sec. II. 

The Bnqlibu 
Kestoba- 

TION. 

1042- 
1066. 

Harold. 
1035— 10S9. 



Harthacnut. 
1040—1042. 



Godwine. 



Eadward 
the Con- 
fessor. 

1042— loco. 



98 



HISTOBT OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Seo. II. 

The English 
Kestoea.- 

TION. 

1042- 
1066. 



Fall of 
God^vliie. 



as a saint in his abbey-church at Westminster. Gleemen sang in 
manlier tones of the long j^eace and glories of his reign, how wai'^ 
riovs and wise councilors stood round his throne, and Welsh and 
Scot and Briton obeyed him. His was the one figure that stood 
out bright against the darkness Avhen England lay trodden under- 
foot by ISTorraan conquerors; and so dear became his memory that 
liberty and independence itself seemed incarnate in his name. In- 
stead of freedom, the subject of William or Henry called for the 
"good laws of Eadward the Confessor." But it was as a mere 
shadow of the past that the exile really returned to the throne of 
JElfred ; there was something shadow-like in the thin form, the 
delicate complexion, the transparent womanly hands that contrasted 
with the blue eyes arid golden hair of his race; and it is almost 
as a shadow that he glides over the political stage. The work of 
government was done by sterner hands. The King's weakness left 
Godwine master of the realm, and he ruled firmly and wisely. 
Abandoning with reluctance all interference in Scandinavian poli- 
tics, he guarded England with a fleet which cruised year by year 
along the coast. Within, though the earldoms still remained jeal- 
ously independent, there were signs that a real political unity was 
being slowly brought about ; the royal writs " ran," as the phrase 
went, to the furthest borders of Mercia and Northumbria. 

It was indeed the increasing sense of order and law, the gr9w- 
ing moral consciousness of Englishmen, that brought about God- 
wine's fall. He alone stood untouched by the religious movement 
of his time, by the enthusiasm which showed itself in monastic 
foundations or superstitious piety or a stricter administration of 
Church patronage. Godwine was the founder of no religious 
house: lie was the plunderer, as every monk believed, of many. 
His whole mind seemed set on the aggrandizement of his family. 
He had given his daughter to the King as wife. His own earl- 
dom embraced all England south of Thames. His son Harold 
was Earl of East-Anglia, while Mercia had been dismembered to 
provide another earldom for his son Swegen. It was Swegen's 
lawlessness which roused an ill-will that all this greed and am- 
bition would hardly have excited. He had seduced the ab- 
bess of Leominster, had sent her home again with a yet more 
outrageous demand of her hand in mariiage, and on the King's 
refusal to grant it had fled from the realm. Godwine's influence 
secured his pardon, but on his very return to seek it Swegen kid- 
naped and murdered his cousin Beorn, who had opposed the 
reconciliation. He again fled to Flanders, and a storm of national 
indignation followed him over-sea. The meeting of the Wise Men 
branded him as " nithing," the " utterly worthless," yet in a year 
his father had again wrested a pardon from the King and restored 
him to his earldom. The scandalous inlawing of such a criminal 
left Godwine alone in a struggle which soon arose with Ead- 
ward himself. The King was, as we have seen, a stranger in 
his realm, and his sympathies lay naturally with the home and 
friends of his youth and exile. He spoke the Norman tongue. 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



99 



He used in Norman fashion a seal foT* his charters. He set Nor- 
man favorites in the highest posts of Church and State. Strangers 
such as these, though hostile to the minister, were powerless against 
Godwine's influence and ability, and when at a later time they vent- 
ured to stand alone against him they fell without a blow. But the 
general ill-will enabled them at this moment to stir Eadward to at- 
tack the earl. A quarrel brought the opportunity. On his return 
from a visit to the court, Eustace, Count of Boulogne, the husband 
of the King's sister, demanded quarters for his train in Dover. 
Strife arose, and many both of the burghers and foreigners were 
slain. All Godwine's better nature withstood Eadward, when the 
King angrily bade him exact vengeance from the town for the af- 
front to his kinsman; but he claimed a fair trial for the townsmen 
only to find himself arraigned with them as a criminal. He at once 
gathered his forces and marched upon Gloucester, demanding the 
expulsion of the foreign favorites; but even in a just quarrel the 
country was cold in his support. The Earls of Mercia and North- 
umberland united their forces to those of Eadward, and in a gather- 
ing of Wise Men at London Swegen's outlawry was renewed, while 
God wine, declining with his usual prudence a useless struggle, with- 
drew over-sea to Flanders. 

But the wrath of the nation was appeased by his fall. Great as 
were Godwine's faults, he Avas the one man who now stood between 
England and the rule of the strangers who flocked to the court; 
and a year had hardly passed when at the appearance of his fleet in 
the Thames Eadward was once more forced to yield. The foreign 
prelates and bishops fled over-sea, outlawed by the same meeting 
of the Wise Men which restored Godwine to his home. He re- 
turned only to die, and the direction of affairs passed quietly to his 
son. 

Harold came to power unfettered by the obstacles which had be- 
set his father, and for twelve years he was the actual governor of 
the realm. The courage, the ability, the genius for administration, 
the ambition and subtlety of Godwine were found again in his son. 
In the internal government of England he followed out his father's 
policy, while avoiding its excesses. Peace was preserved, justice 
administered, and the realm increased in wealth and prosperity. 
Its gold work and embroidery were famous in the markets of 
Flanders and France. But it was a pi'osperity poor in the nobler 
elements of national activity, and dead to the more vivid influences 
of spiritual life. Literature, which on the Continent was kindling 
into a new activity, died down in England into a few psalters and 
homilies. The few minsters raised by king or earls contrasted 
strangely with the religious enthusiasm which was covering Nor- 
mandy and the Rhineland with stately buildings. National his- 
tory there was none. Harold's temper harmonized singularly with 
the temper of his times. His whole statesmanship seemed to aim 
at inaction and repose. Disturbances from without he could crush 
sternly and rapidly ; his military talents displayed themselves in a 
campaign against Wales, and in the boldness and rapidity with 



100 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chai'. 



Seo. in. I which, arming his troops with weapons adapted for mountain con- 
flict, he penetrated to the heart of its fastnesses and reduced the 
country to complete submission. But good influences were kept at 
bay as firmly as evil. The Church sank into lethargy. Monasticism 
was the one rehgious power at the time, and Harold, like his fa- 
ther, hated monks. Stigand, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was 
the adherent of an antipope, and the highest dignity of the English 
Church was deliberately kept in a state of suspension. No ecclesi- 
astical synod, no Church reform, broke the slumbers of its clergy. 
Abroad Eui'ope was waking to a new revival of literature, of art, 
of religion, but England was all but severed from the Continent. 
Like Godwine, Harold's energy seemed to devote itself wholly to 
self-aggvandizement. As the childless Eadward drew to the grave, 
his minister drew closer and closer to the throne. One obstacle 
after another was swept from his path. The rival house of Mercia 
fell crushed by the exile of Earl ^Ifgar; a revolt of the Northum- 
brians, whether prompted by Harold or not, drove Tostig, his broth- 
er and most dangerous opponent, to Flanders. His aim was attain- 
ed without a struggle, and the nobles and bishops who were gather- 
ed round the death-bed of the Confessor passed quietly at once from 
it to the election and coronation of Harold. 



Section III.— Normandy and. the Normans, 912 — 1066. 

[^Authorities. — Dudo of S. Quentin, a verbose and confused writer, has preserved 
the earliest Norman traditions. His work is abridged and continued by William of 
Jumieges, a contemporary of the Conqueror, whose work forms the base of the "Ro- 
man de Rou," composed by Wace in the time of Henry the Second. The religious 
movement is best told by Ordericus Vitalis, a Norman writer of the twelfth century, 
gossiping and confused, but full of valuable information. For Lanfranc see ' ' Lan- 
franci Opera, ed. Giles," and the life in Hook's "Archbishops of Canterbury." For 
Anselm, see the admirable biography by the Rev. R. W. Church. The general his- 
tory of Normandy is told diffusely but picturesquely by Sir F. Palgrave, "Normandy 
and England," more accurately and succinctly by Mr, Freeman, " History of Norman 
Conquest," vols. i. and ii.] 



But the quiet of Harold's accession was at once broken by news 
of danger from a laud which, strange as it seemed then, was soon 
to become almost a part of England itself. A walk through Nor- 
mandy teaches one more of the age of our history which we are 
about to traverse than all the books in the world. The whole story 
of the Conquest stands written in the stately vault of the minster 
at Caen which still covers the tomb of the Conqueror. The name 
of each hamlet by the roadside has its memories for English ears ; 
a fragment of castle wall marks the home of the Bruce, a tiny lit- 
tle viUage preserves the name of the Percy. The very look of the 
country and its people seem familiar to us ; the peasant in his cap 
and blouse recalls the build and features of the small English farm- 
er ; the fields about Caen, with their dense hedge-rows, their elms, 
their apple - orchards, are the very picture of an English country- 



IL] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



101 



side. On the windy heights aronnd rise the square gray keeps 
which Normandy handed on to the cliffs of Richmond or the banks 
of Thames, while huge cathedrals lift themselves over the red- 
;t,iled roof of little market towns, the models of the stately fabrics 
rhich superseded the lowlier churches of JSlfred or Dunstan. 

Rolf the Ganger, or Walker, a pirate leader like Guthrum or 
'Hasting, had wrested the land on either side the mouth of Seine 
from the French king, Charles the Simple, at the moment when 
Alfred's children, Eadward and ^thelfled, were beginning their 
conquest of the EngHsh Danelagh. The treaty in which France 
pui'chased peace by this cession of the coast was a close imitation 
of the Peace of Wedmore. Rolf, like Guthrum, was baptized, re- 
ceived the King's daughter in marriage, and became his vassal for 
the territory which now took the name of "the Northman's land," 
or Normandy. But vassalage and the new faith sat ahke lightly 
on the Dane. No such ties of blood and speech tended to unite 
the Northman with the French among whom he settled along the 
Seine, as united him to the Englishmen among whom he settled 
along the Humber. William Longsword, the son of Rolf, though 
wavering toward France and Christianity, remained Pagan and 
Dane in heart : he called in a Danish colony to occupy his conquest 
of the Cotentin, the peninsula which runs out from St. Michael's 
Mount to the cliffs of Cherbourg, and reared his boy among the 
Northmen of Bayeux^ wliere the Danish tongue and fashions most 
stubbornly held their own. A heathen reaction followed his death, 
and the bulk of the Normans, with his boyish successor, fell away 
for the time froni Christianity, while new pirate-fleets came swarm- 
ing up the Seine. To the close of the century the whole jDeople 
are still " Pirates" to the French around them, their land the " Pi- 
rates' land," their duke the " Pirates' Duke." 

Yet in the end the same forces which merged the Dane in the 
Englishman told even more powerfully on the Dane in France. No 
race has ever shown a greater power of absorbing all the nobler 
characteristics of the peoples with whom they came in contact, or 
of infusing their own energy into them. Dui'ing the long reign of 
Duke Richard the Fearless, the son of William Longsword, heathen 
Norman pirates became French Christians, and feudal at heart. 
The old Norse language lived only at Bayeux, and in a few names, 
such as those of "dale" and "bee," the dell and the stream, which 
marked the local features of the country. As the old Norse free- 
dom died silently away, the descendants of the pirates became feud- 
al nobles, and the "pirates' land" sank into the most loyal of the 
fiefs of France. The change of manners was accompanied by an 
even sharper change of faith, a change which bound the land where 
heathendom had fought most stubbornly for life more closely than 
other lands to the cause of Christianity and the Church. The 
dukes were the first to be touched by the new faith, but the re- 
ligious movement had no sooner spread to the people than it was 
welcomed with an almost passionate fanaticism. Every road was 
crowded with pilgrims. Monasteries rose in every forest glade. 



102 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Herlouin, a knight of Brionne, sought shelter from the world in a 
little valley edged in with woods of ash and elm, through which a 
beck or rivulet (to which his house owed its af ter-uame) runs down 
to the Risle. He was one day busy building an oven with his own 
hands when a stranger greeted him with "God save you!" "Are 
you a Lombard ?" asked the knight-abbot, struck with the foreign 
look of the man. " I am," he replied, and jDraying to be made a 
monk the stranger fell down at the mouth of the oven and kissed 
Herlouin's feet. The Lombard was Laufranc of Pavia, a scholar 
of noble family and especially skilled in the traditions of the Ro- 
man law, who had wandered across the Alps to found a school at 
Avranches, and was now drawn to a religious life by the fame of 
Herlouin's sanctity. The religious impulse was a real one, but 
Lanfranc was destined to be known rather as a great administrator 
and statesman tlian as a saint. His teaching raised Bee, in a few 
years, into the most famous school of Christendom : it was in fact 
the first wave of the intellectual movement which was spreading 
from Italy to the ruder countries of the West. The whole meintal 
activity of the time seemed concentrated in the group of scholars 
who gathered round him : the fabric of the canon law and of med- 
iaeval scholasticism, with the philosophical skepticism Avhich first 
awoke under its influence, all trace their origin to Bee. 

The most famous of these scholars was Anselm of Aosta, an Ital- 
ian like Lanfranc himself, and who was soon to succeed him as Prmr 
and teacher at Bee. Friends as they were, no two men could be 
more strangely unlike. Anselm had grown to manhood in the 
quiet solitude of his mountain-valley, a tender-hearted poet-dreamer, 
with a soul pure as the Alpine snows above him, and an intelligence 
keen and clear as the mountain air. The whole temper of the man 
was painted in a dream of his youth. It seemed to him as though 
heaven lay, a stately palace, amid the gleaming hill-peaks, while the 
women reaping in the corn-fields of the valley became harvest-maid- 
ens of its heavenly King. They reaped idly, and Anselm, grieved 
at their sloth, hastily climbed the mountain side to accuse them to 
their lord. As he reached the palace, the King's voice called him 
to his feet, and he poured forth his tale ; then at the royal bidding 
bread of an unearthly whiteness was set before him, and he ate and 
was refreshed. The dream passed with the morning, but the sense 
of heaven's nearness to earth, the fervid loyalty to the service of 
his Lord, the tender restfulness and peace in'tlae Divine presence 
which it reflected, became the life of Anselm. Wandering, like 
other Italian scholars, to Normandy, he became a monk under Lan- 
franc, and on his teacher's removal to higher duties succeeded him 
in the direction of the Abbey of Bee. No teacher has ever thrown 
a greater spirit of love into his toil. " Force your scholars to im- 
prove !" he burst out to another teacher who relied on blows and 
compulsion. " Did you ever see a craftsman fashion a fair image 
out of a golden plate by blows alone ? Does he not now gently 
press it and strike it with his tools, now with wise art yet more 
gently raise and shape it ? What do your scholars turn into under 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOEEIGN KINGS. 



103 



this ceaseless beating?" "They turn only brutal," was the reply 
"You have bad luck," was the keen answer, "in a training that 
only turns men into beasts." The worst natures softened before 
this tenderness and patience. Even the Conqueror, so harsh and 
terrible to others, became another man, gracious and easy of speech, 
with Anselra, 

But amid his absorbing cares as a teacher, the Prior of Bee 
found time for philosophical speculations, to which we owe the 
great scientific inquiries which built up the theology of the Middle 
Ages. His famous works were the first attempts of any Christian 
thinker to elicit the idea of God from the very nature of the human 
reason. His passion for abstruse thought robbed him of food and 
sleep. Sometimes he could hardly pray. Often the night was a 
long watch till he could seize his conception and write it on the 
wax tablets which lay beside him. But not even a fever of intense 
thought such as this could draw Anselm's heart from its passionate 
tenderness and love. Sick monks in the infirmary could relish no 
drink save the juice which his hand had squeezed for them from 
the grape -bunch. In the later days of his archbishopric a hare 
chased by the hounds took refuge under his horse, and his voice 
grew loud as he forbade a huntsman to stir in the chase, while the 
creature darted off again to the woods. Even the greed of lands 
for the Church to which so many religious men yielded found its 
characteristic rebuke, as the battling lawyers saw Anselm quietly 
close his eyes in court, and go peacefully to sleep. 



Section IV.— The Conqueror, 1042—1066. 

^Authorities. — Primarily the "Gesta Willelmi" of his chaplain, William of Poi- 
tiers, a violent partisan of the Duke. William of Jumieges is here a contemporary, 
and of great value. Orderic and Wace, with the other rhyming chronicle of Benvil 
de Saint Maur, come in the second place. For the invasion and Senlac we have, 
in addition, the contemporary " Carmen de Bello Hastingensi," by Guy, Bishop of 
Amiens, and the invaluable pictures of the Bayeux Tapestry. The English accounts 
are most meagre. The invasion and battle of Senlac are the subject of Mr. Free- 
man's third volume (History of Norman Conquest).] 



It was not this new fervor of faith only which drove Norman 
pilgrims in flocks to the shrines of Italy and the Holy Land. The 
old Norse spirit of adventure turned the Pilgrims into Crusaders, 
and the flower of Norman knighthood, impatient of the stern rule 
of their dukes, followed Roger de Toesny against the Moslem of 
Spain, or enlisted under the banner of the Greeks in their war with 
the Arabs who had conquered Sicily. The Crusaders became con- 
querors under Robert Guiscard, a knight who had left his home in 
the Cotentin with a single follower, but whose valor and wisdom 
soon placed him at the head of his fellow- soldiers in Italy. Attack- 
ing the Greeks, whom they had hitherto served, the Norman knights 
wrested Apulia from them in an overthrow at Cannae, Guiscard 
himself led them to the conquest of Calabria and the great trading 



104 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



cities of the coast, while thirty years of warfare gave Sicily to the 
followers of his brother Roger. The two conquests were united 
under a line of princes to whose munificence art owes the splendor 
of Palermo and Monreale, and literature the first outburst of Italian 
song. Normandy, still seething with vigorous life, was stirred to 
greed and enterprise by this plunder of the South, and the rumor 
of Guiscard's exploits roused into more ardent life the daring am- 
bition of its duke. 

William the Great, as men of his own day styled him, William 
the Conqueror, as by one event he stamped himself on our history, 
was now Duke of Normandy. The full grandeur of his indomita- 
ble will, his large and patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim 
which lifts him out of the petty incidents of his age, had still to be 
disclosed. But there never was a moment from his boyhood when 
he was not among the greatest of men. His life was one long mas- 
tering of difficulty after difficulty. The shame of his birth remain- 
ed in his name of " the Bastard." His father, Duke Robert, had 
seen Arietta, the daughter of a tanner of the town, washing her 
linen in the little brook beneath the cliff of Falaise, and loving her 
had made her the mother of his boy. Robert's departure on a 
pilgrimage from which he never returned left William a child-ruler 
among the most turbulent baronage in Christendom, and treason 
and anarchy surrounded him as he grew to manhood. Disorder 
broke at last into open revolt. Surprised in his hunting-seat 'at 
Valognes by the rising of the Bessin and Cotentin districts, in 
which the Norse temper and lawlessness lingered longest, William 
had only time to dash through the fords of Vire with the rebels in 
his track. A fierce combat of horse on the slopes of Val-es-dunes, 
to the south-eastward of Caen, left him master of the duchy, and 
the old Scandinavian Normandy yielded forever to the new civili- 
zation which streamed in with French alliances and the French 
tongue. William was himself a type of the transition. In the 
young Duke's character the old world mingled strangely with the 
new, the pirate jostled roughly with the statesman. William was 
the most terrible, as he was the last outcome of the Northern race. 
The very spirit of the sea-wolves who had so long lived on the pil- 
lage of the world seemed embodied in his gigantic form, his enor- 
mous strength, his savage countenance, his desperate bravery, the 
fury of his wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge. " No knight 
under heaven," his enemies confessed, " was William's peer." Boy 
as he was, horse and man went down before his lance at Val-es- 
duues. All the gayety of his fierce nature broke out in the chival- 
rous adventures of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins with 
but five soldiers at his back, in his defiant ride over the disputed 
ground, hawk on fist, as though war and the chase were one. No 
man could bend his bow. His mace crashed its way through a ring 
of English warriors to the foot of the Standard. He rose to his 
greatest heights in moments when other men despaired. His voice 
rang out like a trumpet to rally his soldiers as they fled before the 
first English charge at Senlac. In his winter march on Chester he 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



105 



dismounted to put himself at the head of his fainting troops, and 
helped with his own hands to clear a road through the snow-drifts. 
With the Norse daring broke out the Norse cruelty. His venge- 
ance had no touch of human pity. When the revolted townsmen 
of Alen9on hung out raw hides along their walls in scorn of the 
baseness of his birth, with cries of " Work for the Tanner !" Wil- 
liam tore out the eyes of the prisoners he had taken, cut off their 
hands and feet, and flung them into the town. At the close of his 
greatest victory he refused Harold's body a grave. Thousands of 
Hampshire peasants were driven from their homes to make him a 
hunting-ground, and his harrying of Northumbria left the North of 
England a waste for a hundred years. There is a grim, ruthless 
ring about his very jests. In his old age PhiUp of France mocked 
at the Conqueror's unwieldy bulk, and at the sickness which con- 
fined him to his bed at Rouen. "King William has as long a 
lying-in," laughed his enemy, " as a woman behind her curtains !" 
" When I get up," swore William, " I will go to mass in Philip's 
land, and bring a rich offering for my churching. I will offer a 
thousand candles for my fee. Flaming brands shall they be, and 
steel shall glitter over the fire they make." At harvest-tide, town 
and hamlet flaring into ashes along the French border fulfilled the 
Conqueror's vow. There is the same savage temper in the loneli- 
ness of his life. He recked little of men's love or hate. His grim 
look, his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, spread 
terror through his court. " Stark mad he was, and great awe men 
had of him," was the comment of his subjects on his death. His 
graciousness to Anselm only brought out into stronger relief the 
general harshness of his tone. His very wrath was solitary. "To 
no man spake he, and no man dared speak to him," when the news 
reached him of Harold's accession to the throne. He found society 
only when he passed from the palace to the loneliness of the woods. 
" He loved the wild deer as though he had been their father. 
Whosoever should slay hart or hind man should blind him," 
Death itself took its color from the savage solitude of his life. 
Priests and nobles fled as the last breath left him, and the Con- 
queror's body lay naked and lonely on the floor. 

It was the genius of William which lifted him out of this mere 
Norseman into the greatest general and statesman of his time. 
The growth of the Norman power was jealously watched by Geof- 
fry Martel, the Count of Anjou, and his influence succeeded in con- 
verting France from friend to foe. The danger changed William 
at once from the chivalrous knight-errant of Yal-es- dunes into a 
wary strategist. As the French army crossed the border he hung 
cautiously on its flanks, till a division which had encamped in the 
little town of Mortemer had been surprised and cut to pieces by his 
soldiers. A second division was still held at bay by the Duke him- 
self, when Roger de Toesny, climbing up into a tree, shouted to 
them the news of their comrades' fall. " Up, up, Frenchmen ! you 
sleep too long: go bury your friends that lie slain at Mortemer." 
A second and more formidable invasion four years later was met 



106 



JSISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



with the same cautious strategy. William hung on the French- . 
men's flank, looking coolly on while town and abbey were plun- 
dered, the Bessin ravaged, Caen sacked, and the invaders prepared 
to cross the Dive and carry fire and sword into the rich land of 
Lisieux. But only half the army was over the river when the Duke 
fell suddenly upon its rear. The fight raged till the rising of the 
tide cut the French forces, as William had foreseen, hopelessly in 
two. Huddled together on a narrow causeway, swej)t by the Nor- 
man arrows, knights, footmen, and baggage train were involved in 
the same ruin. Not a man escaped, and the French King, who had 
been forced to look on helplessly from the opposite bank, fled home 
to die. The death of Geoifry Martel left William without a rival 
among the princes of France. Maine, the border -land between 
Normandy and Angevin, and which had for the last ten years been 
held by Anjou, submitted without a struggle to his rule. Brittany, 
which had joined the league of his foes, was reduced to submission 
by a single march. 

All this activity abroad was far from distracting the Duke's 
attention from Normandy itself. It was hard to secure jjeace and 
order in a land filled with turbulent robber-lords. "The Norman 
must be trodden down and kept underfoot," said one of their 
poets, "and he who bridles them may use them at his need." 
William "could never love a robber." His stern protection of 
trader and peasant roused the baronage through his first ten years 
to incessant revolt. His very kinsfolk headed the discontent, and 
summoned the French King to their aid. But the victories of 
Mortemer and Varaville left the rebels at his mercy. Some rotted 
in his dungeons, for "stark" as he was the Duke abhorred blood- 
shed; some were di'iven into exile, and joined the conquerors of 
Apulia and Sicily. The land settled down into peace and order, 
and William turned to the reform of the Church. Malger, the 
Archbishop of Rouen, a mere hunting and feasting prelate, was 
summarily deposed, and his place filled by Maurilius, a French ec- 
clesiastic of piety and learning. Frequent councils under the 
Duke's guidance amended the morals of the clergy. The school of 
Bee, as we have seen, had become a centre of education ; and Wil- 
liam, with the keen insight into men which formed so marked a 
feature in his genius, selected its Prior as his chief adviser. In a 
strife with the Papacy which the Duke had provoked by his mar- 
riage with Matilda of Flanders, Lanfranc had shown himself an 
ardent partisan of Rome, and his opposition had been punished by 
a sentence of banishment. The Prior set out on a lame horse, the 
only one his house could afford, and was overtaken by the Duke, 
impatient that he should quit Normandy. " Give me a better horse 
and I shall go the quicker," replied the impei'turbable Lombard, 
and the Duke's wrath passed^into laughter and good-will. From 
that hour Lanfranc became his minister and counselor, whether for 
the affairs of the Church or the more daring schemes of foreign 
oppression which were opened up to him by the position of En- 
gland. 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



107 



Quai'rel after quarrel had for half a century been drawing the 
two countries nearer together. At the close of the reign of Rich- 
ard the Fearless the Danish descents upon the English coast had 
found support in Normandy, and their fleet had wintered in her 
ports. It was to revenge these attacks that ^thelred had dispatch- 
ed a fleet across the Channel to ravage the Cotentin, but the fleet 
was repulsed and the strife appeased by ^Ethelred's marriage with 
Emma, a sister of Richard the Good, ^thelred with his children 
found shelter in Normandy from the Danish kings, and, if Norman 
accounts are to be trusted, contrary winds alone prevented a Nor- 
man fleet from undertaking their restoration. The peaceful recall 
of Eadward to the throne seemed to open England to Norman am- 
bition, and Godwine was no sooner banished than Duke William 
appeared at the English court, and received, as he afterward assert- 
ed, a promise of succession to its throne from the King. _ Such a 
promise, unconfirmed by the national assembly of the Wise Men, 
was utterly valueless, and for the moment Godwine's recall put an 
end to William's hopes. They were revived by a storm which 
threw Harold, while cruising in the Channel, on the French coast, 
and forced him to swear on the relics of the saint to support the 
Duke's claim as the price of his own return to England : Sut the 
news of the King's death was at once followed by that of Harold's 
accession, and after a burst of furious passion the Duke prepared 
to enforce his claim by arms. < William did not in any strict sense 
claim the crown. He claimed simply the right which he afterward 
used, when his sword had won it, of presenting himself for election 
by the nation, and he believed himself entitled so to present himself 
by the direct commendation of the Confessor, The actual election 
of Harold, which stood in his way, hurried as it was, he did not 
recognize as valid. But with this constitutional claim was inexti'i- 
cably mingled his resentment at the pi'ivate wrong which Harold 
had done him, and a resolve to exact vengeance on the man whom 
he regarded as untrue to his oath. JThe wrong-doing of Harold 
furnished indeed no just ground for shedding the blood of English- 
men, but even in modern times we have not learned practically to 
dissociate the private acts of rulers from the public responsibility 
of their subjects.^ 

The difiiculties^in the way of his enterprise were indeed enor- 
mous. He could reckon on no support within England itself. At 
home he had to extort the consent of his own reluctant baronage ; 
to gather a motley host from every quarter of France, and to keep 
it together for months; to create a fleet, to cut down the very 
trees, to build, to launch, to man the vessels, and to find time 
amid all this for the commonjmainess of government, for negoti- 



ations with Denmark and the Empire, with France, Brittany, and 
Anjou, with Flanders and with lEiome. His rival's difficulties were 
hardly less than his own. Harold was threatened with invasion by 
his brother Tostig, w^ho had taken refuge in Norway, as well as by 
William ; and the fleet and army he had gathered lay watching for 
months along the coast. His one standing force was his body of 



108 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Seo. IV. I hus-carls, but their numbers only enabled them to act as the nucle- 
us of an army. On the other hand, the Land-Fyrd, or general levy 
of lighting men, was a body easy to raise for any single encounter, 
but hard to keep together. To assemble such a force was to bring 
labor to a standstill. The men gathered under the King's stand- 
ard were the farmers and plowmen of their fields. The ships 
were the fishing -vessels of the coast. In September the task of 
holding them together became imj)ossible, but their dispersion had 
hardly taken place when the two clouds which had so long been 
gathering burst at once upon the realm. A change of wind re- 
leased the land-locked armament of William ; but before changing, 
the wind which prisoned the Duke had flung the host of Harald 
Hardrada, the King of Norway, whose aid Tostig had enlisted, on 
the coast of his old earldom of Yorkshire. The King hastened 
with his household troops to the spot and repulsed the invaders 
in a decisive overthrow at Stamford Bridge, in the neighborhood 
of York, but ere he could hurry back to London the Norman host 
had crossed the sea, and William, who had anchored on the 28th 
off the shingly coast of Pevensey, was ravaging the coast to bring 
his rival to an engagement. To march inland would have been to 
cut himself off from his fleet, his one base of operations and only 
hope in case of defeat. His merciless ravages succeeded, as they 
were intended, in drawing Harold to an engagement ; but the Kin^ 
judiciously refused to attack with the forces he had hastily sum- 
moned to his banner. If he was forced to give battle, he resolved 
to give it on ground he had himself chosen, and, advancing near 
enough to the coast to check William's ravages, he intrenched 
himself on the hill of Senlac, a low spur of the Sussex Downs, near 
Hastings, in a position which covered London, and forced the Nor- 
man army to concentrate. With a host subsisting by pillage, to 
concentrate is to starve, and no alternative was left to William but 
a decisive victory or ruin. 

Along the higher ground that leads from Hastings the Duke led 
his men in the dim dawn of an October morning to the mound of 
Telham, It was from this point that the Normans saw the host of 
the English gathered thickly behind a rough trench and a stock- 
ade on the height of Senlac. Marshy ground covered their right ; 
on the left, the most exposed part of the position, the hus-carls or 
body-guard of Harold, men in full armor and wielding huge axes, 
were grouped round the Golden Dragon of Wessex and the stand- 
ard of the King. The re o of the ground was covered by the thick 
masses of half-armed rn sties who had flocked at Harold's summons 
to the fight with th'^ 'stranger. It was against the centre of this 
formidable posititin '^'hat William arrayed his Norman knighthood, 
while the mercen:ay forces he had gathered in France and Brittany 
wei'e ordered to attack its flanks. A general charge of the Nor- 
man foot opened the battle; in front rode the minstrel Taillefer, 
tossing his sword in the air and catching it again while he chant- 
ed the song of Roland. He was the first of the host who struck a 
blow, and he was the first to fall. The charge broke vainly on the 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDJEB FOREIGN KINGS. 



109 



stout stockade behind which the English warriox-s plied axe and 
javelin with fierce cries of " Out, Out," and the repulse of the Nor- 
man footmen was followed by the repulse of the Norman horse. 
Again and again the Duke rallied and led them to the fatal stock- 
ade. All the fury of fight that glowed in his Norseman's blood, 
all the headlong valor that had spurred him over the slopes of Yal- 
es-dunes, mingled that day with the coolness of head, the dogged 
perseverance, the inexhaustible faculty of resource which had shone 
at Mortemer and Yaraville. His Breton troops, entangled in the 
marshy ground on his left, broke in disorder, and a cry arose, as the 
panic spread through the army, that the Duke was slain. " I live," 
shouted William, as he tore off his helmet, " and by God's help will 
conquer yet." Maddened by repulse, the Duke spurred right at 
the standard; unhorsed, his tei'rible mace struck down Gyrth, the 
King's brother, and stretched Leofwine, a second of Godwine's 
sons, beside him ; again dismounted, a blow from his hand hurled 
to the ground an unmannerly rider who would not lend him his 
steed. Amid the roar and tumult of the battle he turned the 
flight he had arrested into the means of victory. Broken as the 
stockade was by his desperate onset, the shield-wall of the warriors 
behind it still held the Normans at bay, when William by a feint 
of flight drew a part of the English force from their post of van- 
tage. Turning on his disorderly pursuers, the Duke cut them to 
pieces, broke through the abandoned line, and was master of the 
central plateau, while French and Bretons made good their ascent 
on either flank. At three the hill seemed won, at six the fight still 
raged around the standard, where Harold's hus-carls stood stub- 
bornly at bay on the spot marked afterward by the high altar of 
Battle Abbey. An order from the Duke at last brought his arch- 
ers to the front, and their arrow-flight told heavily on the dense 
masses crowded around the King. As the sun went down, a shaft 
pierced Harold's right eye ; he fell between the royal ensigns, and 
the battle closed with a desperate melee over his corpse. While 
night covered the flight of the English, the Conqueror pitched his 
tent on the very spot where his rival had fallen, and " sate down to 
eat and drink among the dead." 

Securing Romney and Dover, the Duke marched slowly by Can- 
terbury upon London. Faction and intrigue were in reality doing 
his work for him. Harold's brothers had fallen with the King on 
the field of Senlac, and there was none of the house of Godwine to 
contest the crown ; while of the old royal^ Tine there remained but a 
single boy, Eadgar the JEtheling, son of "the eldest of Eadmund 
Ironside's children, who had fled, as we have seen, before Cnut's 
persecution as far as Hungary for shelter. Be us he was, he was 
chosen king, but the choice gave little strength,, to the national 
cause. The widow of the Confessor surrendered Winchester to the 
Duke. The bishops gathered at London inclined to submission. 
The citizens themselves faltered as William, passing by their walls, 
gave Southwark to the flames. The throne of the boy-king really 
rested for suppcirt on the Earls of Mercia and Northumbrian Ead- 



no 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



wine and Morkere ; and William, crossing the Thames at Walling- 
ford and marching into Hertfordshire, threatened to cut them off 
from their earldoms. The masterly movement brought about an 
instant submission. Eadwine and Morkere retreated hastily home 
from London, and the city gave way at once. Eadgar himself was 
at the head of the deputation who came to offer the crown to the 
Norman Duke ; " they bowed to him," says the English annalist, 
pathetically, " for need." They bowed to the Norman as they had 
bowed to the Dane, and William accepted the crown in the spirit 
of Cnut. London indeed was secured by the erection of a for- 
tress which afterward grew into the Towei-, but William desired to 
reign not as a conqueror but as a lawful king. He received the 
crown at Westminster from the hands of Archbishop Ealdred, amid 
shouts of "Yea, Yea," from his new English subjects. Fines from 
the greater laud-owners atoned for a resistance which was now 
counted as rebellion ; but with this exception every measure of the 
new sovereign indicated his desire of ruling as a successor of Ead- 
ward or Alfred. As yet, indeed, the greater part of England re- 
mained quietly aloof from him, and le can hardly be said to have 
been recognized as king by Northumberland or the greater part of 
Mercia. But to the east of a line which stretched from Norwich 
to Dorsetshire his rule was unquestioned, and over this j^ortion he 
ruled as an English king. Plis soldiers were kept in strict order. 
No change was made in law or custom. The privileges of London 
were recognized by a royal writ which still remains, the most ven- 
erable of its muniments, among the city's archives. Peace and 
order were restored. William even attempted, though in vain, to 
learn the English tongue, that he might personally administer jus- 
tice to the suitors in his court. The kingdom seemed so tranquil 
that only a few months had passed after the battle of Senlac when 
William, leaving England in charge of his brother, Odo Bishop of 
Bayeux, and his minister, William Fitz - Osbern, returned for a 
while to Normandy. 

Section V.— The Norman Conquest, 1068— 1071. 

[Authorities. — The Norman writers as before, Orderic being particularly valuable 
and detailed. The Chronicle and Florence of Worcester are the primary English 
authorities (for the so-called "Ingulf of Croyland" is a forgery of the 14th century). 
Domesday Book is of course indispensable for the Norman settlement ; the intro- 
duction to it by Sir Henry Ellis gives a brief account of its chief results. Among 
secondary authorities Simeon of Durham is useful for Northern matters, and Wil- 
liam of Malmesbury valuable from his remarkable combination of Norman and 
Enghsh feehng. The Norman constitution is described at knigth by Lingard, but 
best studied in the documents and prefaces of Professor Stubbs's "Documents Illus- 
trative, etc." The " Anglia Judaica" of Toovey gives some account of the Jewish 
colonies. For the history as a whole, see Mr. Freeman's "Norman Conquest," 
vol. iv.] ^ 

It is not to his victory at Senlac, but to the struggle which fol- 
lowed his return from Normandy, that William owes his title of 
the " Conqueror." During his absence Bishop Odo's tyranny had 



n.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOBEIGN KINGS. 



Ill 



forced the Kentishmen to seek aid from Count Eustace of Bou- 
logne, while the Welsh princes supported a similar rising against 
Norman oppression in the West. But as yet the eastern counties 
trusted and held firmly by the King; Dover was saved, and the 
discontented fled over the sea to seek refuge in lands as distant as 
Constantinople, where we find Englishmen composing great part of 
the Imperial body-guard. A league of the western towns, headed 
by Exeter, threatened to prove a more serious danger, but William 
found an English force to suppress it, and it was at the head of an 
English army that he advanced upon Mercia and the North. His 
march through Central England reduced Eadwine and Morkere to 
submission, and a second rising ended in the occupation of York. 

England now lay helpless at his feet, but William's position as 
an English King remained unaffected. He became the Conqueror 
only in face of a national revolt. The signal for it came from with- 
out. Swegen, the king of Denmark, had for two years been pre- 
paring to dispute England with the Norman, and on the appear- 
ance of his fleet in the Humber the nation rose as one man. Ead- 
gar the JStheling, with a band of noble exiles who had taken refuge 
in Scotland, joined the Danes ; in the West the men of Devon, Som- 
erset, and Dorset gathered to the sieges of Exeter and Montacute, 
while the new Norman castle at Shrewsbury alone bridled the rising 
along the Welsh border. So ably had the revolt been planned that 
even William was taken by surprise. The news of the loss of York 
and of the slaughter of three thousand Normans who formed its gar- 
rison reached him as he was hunting in the Forest of Dean, and in a 
wild outburst of wrath the King swore by " the splendor of God" 
to avenge himself on Northurabria. But wrath went hand in hand 
with the coolest statesmanship. William saw clearly that the cen- 
tre of resistance lay in the Danish fleet, and pushing rapidly to the 
Humber with a handful of horsemen, he purchased by a heavy bi'ibe 
its inactivity and withdrawal. Then leaving York to the last, Wil- 
liam turned rapidly westward with the troops which gathered round 
him, and swept the Welsh marshes as far as Shrewsbury. Exeter 
had been already relieved by William Fitz-Osbern, and the King 
Avas free to fulfill his oath of revenge on the North. After a long 
delay before the flooded w^aters of the Aire he entered York, and 
ravaged the whole country as far as the Tees with fire and sword. 
Town and village were harried and burned, their inhabitants slain 
or driven over the Scotch border. The coast was especially wasted, 
that no hold might remain for any future invasion of the Danes. 
Harvest, cattle, the very implements of husbandry were so merci- 
lessly destroyed, that the famine which followed is said to have 
swept off more than a hundred thousand victims, while half a cen- 
tury later the land still lay bare of culture and deserted of men for 
sixty miles northward of York. The work of vengeance was no 
sooner over than William led his array back from the Tees to York, 
and thence to Chester and the West. Never had he shown the 
grandeur of his character so memorably as in this terrible march. 
The winter was severe, the roads choked with snow-drifts or broken 



112 



SIS TOE Y OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



by torrents ; provisions failed, and the army, drenched with rain 
and forced to consume its horses for food, broke out into open mu- 
tiny at the order to advance across the bleak country that separates 
Yorkshire from the West. The mercenaries from Anjou and Brit- 
tany demanded their release from service, and William granted 
their prayer with scorn. On foot, at the head of the troops which 
remained faithful, the King forced his way by paths inaccessible to 
horses, often aiding his men with his own hands to clear the road. 
The last hopes of the English ceased on his arrival at Chester ; the 
King remained undisputed master of the conquered country, and 
busied himself in the erection of numerous castles which were 
henceforth to hold it in subjection. Two years passed quietly ere 
the last act of the conquest was reached. By the withdrawal of 
the Dane the hopes of England rested wholly on the aid it looked 
for from Scotland, where Eadgar the ^theling had taken refuge, 
and where his sister 'Margaret had become the wife of King Mal- 
colm. It was probably Malcolm's instigation which roused Ead- 
wine and Morkere to a renewed revolt, which was at once foiled by 
the vigilance of the Conqueror. Eadwine fell in an obscure skir- 
mish on the Scotch border, while Morkere found refuge for a time in 
the marshes of the eastern counties, where a desperate band of pa- 
triots had gathered round the outlaw, Hereward. Nowhere had 
William found a more obstinate resistance, but in spite of natural 
obstacles he drove a causeway two miles long across the fens, and 
the last hopes of England died in the surrender of Ely. Malcolm 
alone held out till the Conqueror summoned the whole host of the 
Crown, and crossing the Lowlands and the Forth penetrated into 
the heart of Scotland. He had reached the Tay when the King's 
resistance gave way, and Malcolm appeared in the English camp and 
swore fealty at William's feet. 

The struggle which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed 
William's position. He no longer held the land merely as elected 
king; he added to his elective right the right of conquest. The 
system of government which he originated was, in fact, the result 
of the double character of his power. It represented neither the 
purely feudal system of the Continent nor the system of the older 
English royalty. More truly perhaps it may be said to have rep- 
resented both. As the successor of Ead ward, William retained the 
judicial and administrative organization of the older English 
realm. As the conqueror of England, he introduced the military 
organization of feudalism, so far as was necessary for the secure 
possession of his conquests. The ground was already prepared for 
such an organization ; we have seen the beginnings of English feud- 
alism in the warriors, the " companions" or " thegns," who were 
personally attached to the King's war- band, and received estates 
from the royal domain in reward for their personal service. Under 
the English kings this feudal distribution of estates had greatly in- 
creased, the bulk of the nobles having followed the royal example 
and united their tenants to themselves by a similar process of subin- 
feudation. On the other hand, the pure freeholders, the class which 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



113 



formed the basis of the original English society, had been gradual- 
ly reduced in number, partly through imitation of the class above 
them, but still more through the incessant wars and invasions which 
drove them to seek protectors among the thegns, even at the cost of 
independence. Feudalism, in fact, was superseding the older free- 
dom in England even before the reign of William, as it had already 
superseded it in Germany or France, But the tendency was quick- 
ened and intensified by the Conquest : the desperate and universal 
resistance of his English subjects forced William to hold by the 
sword what the sword had won, and an army strong enough to 
crush at any moment a national revolt was necessary for the preser- 
vation of his throne. Such an army could only be maintained by 
a vast confiscation of the soil. The failure of the English risings 
cleared the way for its establishment ; the greater part of the high- 
er nobility had fallen in battle or fled into exile, while the lower 
thegnhood had either forfeited the whole of their lands or redeemed 
a portion of them by the surrender of the rest. We see the com- 
pleteness of the confiscation in the vast estates which William was 
enabled to grant to his more powerful followers. Two hundred 
manors in Kent, with an equal number elsewhere, rewarded the serv- 
ices of his brother Odo, and grants almost as lai'ge fell to the roy- 
al ministers, Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery, or to barons like the 
Mowbrays, the Warrennes, and the Clares. But the poorest soldier 
of fortune found his part in the spoil. The meanest Norman rose 
to wealth and power in the new dominion of his duke. Great or 
small, however, eacb estate thus held from the Crown was held by 
its tenant on condition of military service at the royal call; and 
when the larger holdings were divided by their owners, as was 
commonly the case, into smaller s^^b - tenancies, the under - tenants 
were bound by the same conditions of service to their lord. 
"Hear, my lord," swore the feudal dependent, as kneeling without 
arms and bare-headed he placed his hands within those of his supe- 
rior. " I become liege-man of yours for life and limb and earthly 
regard, and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and death, 
God help me." The kiss of his lord invested him with land or 
"fief," to descend to him and his heirs forever. A whole army was 
by this means camped upon the soil, and the King's summons could 
at any moment gather sixty thousand knights to the royal standard. 
Such a force, however, effective as it was against the conquered, 
was hardly less formidable to the Crown itself. William found 
himself fronted in his new realm by the feudal baronage whom he 
had so hardly subdued to his will in Normandy, nobles impatient of 
law, and aiming at an hereditary military and judicial power with- 
in their own manors independent of the King. The genius of the 
Conqu , in his quick discernment of this danger and in 

the sk . he met it. He availed himself of the old legal 

constii country to hold justice firmly in his own hands. 

He re 3al courts of the hundred and the shire, where 

every a place, while he subjected all to the jurisdiction 

of the t, which toward the close of the earlier English 

8 



]]4 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Si:c. V. 

TirE NOEMAN 
L'ONQUBST. 

106S- 
lOTl. 



The 
Chwrcli of 

tlie 
Normans. 



monarchy had assumed the right of hearing appeals and of calling 
np cases from any quarter to its bar. The authority of the Crown 
was maintained by the abolition of the great earldoms which had 
overshadowed it, those of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumberland, 
and by the royal nomination of sheriffs for the government of the 
shires. The estates of the great nobles, large as they were, were 
scattered over the country in a way which made union between the 
land-owners, or the hereditary attachment of great masses of vassals 
to a separate lord, equally impossible. By a usage peculiar to En- 
gland, each sub-tenant, in addition to his oath of fealty to his lord, 
swore fealty directly to the Crown. The feudal obligations, too, the 
rights and dues owing from each estate to the King, \Yere enforced 
with remarkable strictness. Each tenant was bound to appear if 
needful thrice a year at the royal court, to pay a heavy fine or rent 
on succession to his estate, to contribute an "aid" in money in case 
of the King's capture in war, or the knighthood of the King's eldest 
son, or the marriage of his eldest daughter. An heir who was still 
a minor passed into the Crown's wardship, and all profit from his 
estate went for the time to the King. If the estate devolved upon 
an heiress, her hand was at the King's disposal, and was generally 
sold to tlie highest bidder. All manors, too, were burdened with 
their own " customs," or special dues to the Crown, and it was for 
the purpose of ascertaining and recording these that William sent 
into each county the commissioners whose inquiries are preserved 
in Domesday-Book. A jury impaneled in each hundred declared 
on oath the extent and nature of each estate, the names, numbers, 
condition of its inhabitants, its value before and after the Conquest, 
and the sums due from it to the Crown. 

William found another check on the aggressive spirit of the feud- 
al baronage in his organization of the Church. One of his earliest 
acts was to summon Lanfranc from Normandy to aid him in its re- 
form ; and the deposition of Stigand, which raised Lanfranc to the 
see of Canterbury, was followed by the removal of most of the En- 
glish prelates and abbots, and by the appointment of Norman ec- 
clesiastics in their place. The synods of the new ArchbishojD did 
much to restore discipline, and William's own efforts were no doubt 
directed by a real desire for the religious improvement of his realm. 
" In choosing abbots and bishops," says a contemporary, " he con- 
sidered not so much men's riches or power as their holiness and 
wisdom. He called together bishops and abbots and other wise 
counselors in any vacancy, and by their advice inquired very care- 
fully who Avas the best and wisest man, as Avell in divine things as 
in worldly, to rule the Church of God." But, honest as they were, 
the King's reforms tended directly to the increase of the royal 
power. The new bishops and abbots were cut off by their foreign 
origin from the flocks they ruled, while their popular influence was 
lessened by the removal of ecclesiastical cases from the hundred 
court, where till now the bishop had sat side by side with the civil 
magistrate, to the separate court of the bishop himself. Pregnant 
as this measure was with future trouble to the Crown, it must for 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOEEIGN KINGS. 



115 



the time have farthered the isolation of the prelates, and fixed them 
into a position of dependence on the King, Avhich was enhanced by 
the strictness with which William enforced his supremacy over the 
Church. Homage was exacted from bishop as from baron. ISTo 
excommunication could be issued without the King's license. No 
sj'nod could legislate without his previous assent and subsequent 
confirmation of its decrees. No papal letters could be received 
within the realm save by his permission. William was indeed the 
one ruler of his time who dared firmly to repudiate the claims which 
were now beginning to be put forward by the court of Rome. 
When Gregory VII. called on him to do fealty for his realm, the 
King sternly refused to admit the claim. "Fealty I have never 
willed to do, nor do I will to do it now. I have never promised 
it, nor do I find that my j)redecessors did it to yours." 

But the greatest safeguard of the Crown lay in the wealth and 
personal power of the kings. Extensive as had been his grants to 
noble and soldier, William remained the greatest land-owner in his 
realm. His rigid exaction of feudal dues added wealth to the great 
Hoard at Winchester, which had been begun by the spoil of the 
conquered. But William found a more ready source of revenue in 
the settlement of the Jewish traders, who followed him from Nor- 
mandy, and who were enabled by the royal protection to establish 
themselves in separate quarters or " Jewries" of the chief towns of 
England. The Jew had no right or citizenship in the land ; the 
Jewry in which he lived was, like the King's forest, exempt from 
the common law. He was simply the King's chattel, and his life 
and goods were absolutely at the King's mercy. But he was too 
valuable a possession to be lightly thrown away. A royal justi- 
ciary secured law to the Jewish merchant, who had no standing- 
ground in the local courts; his bonds were dej^osited for safety in 
a chamber of the royal palace at Westminster, which from their 
Hebrew name of " Starrs" gained the title of the Star-Chamber ; he 
was protected against the popular hatred in the free exercise of his 
religion, and allowed to erect synagogues and to direct his own ec- 
clesiastical affairs by means of a chief rabbi. No measures-could 
have been moi'e beneficial to the kingdom at large. The Jew was 
the only capitalist in Europe, and, heavy as was the usury he exact- 
ed, his loans gave an impulse to industry such as England had nev- 
er felt before. The century which followed the Conquest witness- 
ed an outburst of architectural energy which covered the land with 
castles and cathedrals; but castle and cathedral alike owed their 
existence to the loans of the Jew. His own example gave a new 
direction to domestic architecture. The buildings which, as at 
Lincoln and St. Edmundsbury, still retain their title of " Jews' 
Houses," were almost the first houses of stone which superseded 
the mere hovels of the English burghers. Nor was the influence 
of the Jews simply industrial. Through their connection with the 
Jewish schools in Spain and the East they opened a way for the 
revival of physical science. A Jewish medical school seems to have 
existed at Oxford ; Adelard of Bath brought back a knowledge of 



116 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



matbematics from Cordova; Roger Bacon himself studied under 
the English rabbis. But to the kings the Jew was simply an en- 
gine of finance. The wealth which his industry accumulated was 
wrung from him whenever the King had need, and tortui'e and im- 
prisonment were resorted to if milder entreaties failed. It was the 
wealth of the Jew that filled the royal exchequer at the outbreak of 
war or of revolt. It was in the Hebrew coffers that the Norman 
kings found strength to hold their baronage at bay. 



Section VI.— The Suglisli Bevival, 1071—1127. 

[Authorities. — Orderic and the English chroniclers, as before. Eadmer, a monk 
of Canterbury, in his "Historia Novorum" and his "Life of Anselm," is the chief 
source of information for the reign of William the Second. "William of Malmesbury 
and Henry of Huntingdon are both contemporary authorities during that of Henry 
the First : the latter remains a brief but accurate annalist ; the former is the leader 
of a new historic school, who treat English events as part of the histoiy of the world, 
and emulate classic models by a more philosophical arrangement of their materials. 
See for them the opening section of the next chapter. On the early history of our 
towns, the reader may gain something from Mr. Thompson's "English Municipal 
History" (London, 1857) ; more from the " Chatter Rolls" (published by the Record 
Commissioners); for St. Edmundsbury, see "Chronicle of Jocelyn de Brakelond" 
(Camden Society). The records of the Cistercian Abbeys of Yorkshire, in Dugdale's 
"Monasticon," illustrate the religious revival. Henry's administration is admirably 
explained for the first time by Professor Stubbs ("Documents illustrative," etc.).], 



The Conquest was hardly over when the struggle between the 
baronage and the Crown began. The wisdom of William's policy 
in the destruction of the great earldoms which had overshadowed 
the throne was shown in an attempt at their restoration made by 
Roger, the son of his minister WiUiam Fitz-Osbern, and the Bre- 
ton, Ralf de Guader, whom the King had rewarded for his services 
at Senlac with the earldom of IsTorfolk. The rising was quickly 
suppressed, Roger thrown into prison, and Ralf driven over-sea ; 
but the intrigues of the baronage soon found another leader in 
William's half-brother, the Bishop of Bayeux. Under pretense of 
aspiring by arms to the Papacy, Bishop Odo collected money and 
men ; but the treasure was at once seized by the royal ofiicers, and 
the Bishop arrested in the midst of the Court. Even at the King's 
bidding no officer would venture to seize on a prelate of the Church ; 
it was with his own hands that William was forced to effect his ar- 
rest. " I arrest not the Bishop, but the Earl of Kent," laughed the 
Conqueror, and Gdo remained a prisoner till his death. It was in 
fact this vigorous personality of WiUiam which proved the chief 
safeguard of his throne. " Stark he was," says the English chron- 
men that withstood him. So harsh and cruel was he that 
)d resist his will. Earls that did aught against his bid- 
iast into bonds, bishops he stripped of their bishoprics, 
their abbacies. He spared not his own brother; first he 
3 land, but the King cast him into bondage. If a man 
„^^^yA. live and hold his lands, need it were that he followed the 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



117 



King's will." But stern as his rule was, it gave peace to the land. 
Eveu amid the sufferings which necessarily sprang from the circum- 
stances of the Conquest itself, from the erection of castles, or the 
inclosure of forests, or the exactions which built up the great Hoard 
at Winchester, Englishmen were unable to forget " the good peace 
he made in the land, so that a man might fare over his realm with a 
bosom full of gold." Strange touches of a humanity far in advance 
of his age contrasted' with the general temper of his government. 
One of the strongest traits in his character was his aversion to shed 
blood by process of law ; he formally abolished the punishment of 
death, and only a single execution stains the annals of his reign. 
An edict yet more honorable to him put an end to the slave-trade, 
which had till then been carried on at the port of Bristol. If he 
was stark to baron or rebel, he was " mild to them that loved God." 
In power as in renown, the Conqueror towered high above his 
predecessors on the throne. The fear of the Danes, which' had 
so long hung like a thunder-cloud over England, passed away be- 
fore the host which "William gathered to meet a great armament 
assembled by King Cnut. A mutiny dispersed the Danish fleet, 
and the murder of its King removed all peril from the North. 
Scotland, already humbled by William's invasion, was bridled by 
the erection of a strong fortress at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and after 
penetrating with his army to the heart of Wales, the King com- 
menced its systematic reduction by settling barons along its frontier, 
with license to conquer the land to their own profit. His closing 
years were disturbed by a rebellion of his son Robert and a quarrel 
with France ; as he rode down the steep street of Mantes, which he 
had given to the flames, his horse stumbled among the embers, and 
William, flung heavily from his saddle, was borne home to Rouen 
to die. The sound of the minster bell woke him at dawn as he lay 
in the convent of St. Gervais, overlooking the city — it was the hour 
of prime — and stretching out his hands in prayer, the Conqueror 
passed quietly away. With him passed the terror which had held 
the baronage in awe, while the severance of his dominions roused 
their hopes of successful resistance to the stern rule beneath which 
they had bowed. WilUam had bequeathed Normandy to his eld- 
est son Robert ; William, his second son, had hastened with his 
father's ring to England, where the influence of Lanfranc at once 
secured him the-cro^n^ — ^The baronage seized the opportunity to 
rise in arms under pretext of supporting the claims of Robert, 
whose weakness of character gave full scope for the growth of 
feudal independence, and Bishop Odo placed himself at the head of 
the revolt. The new king was thrown almost wholly on the loyal- 
ty of his English subjects, but their hatred of Norman lawlessness 
rallied them to his standard; Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, the 
one surviving bishop of English blood, defeated the insurgents in 
the West, and the King, summoning the freemen of country and 
town to his host under pain of being bi-anded as " nithing," or 
worthless, advanced with a large force against Rochester, where the 
barons were concentrated. A plague which had broken out among 



Sec. VI, 



lis 



HISTORY OF TEE ENaLISR PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the gaiTison forced them to capitulate; and as the prisoners passed 
through the royal army, cries of " Gallows and cord" burst from 
the English ranks. At a later period of his reign a vast conspiracy 
was organized to place Stephen of Albemarle, a distant connection 
of the royal house, upon the throne; but the capture of Robert 
Mowbray, the Earl of Northumberland, who had placed himself at 
its head, and the imprisonment and exile of his fellow-conspirators, 
again crushed the hopes of the baronage. 

While the spirit of national patriotism rose to life again in this 
struggle of the Crown against the baronage, the boldness of a single 
ecclesiastic revived a national opposition to the mere administrative 
despotism which had prevailed since the fatal day of Senlac. .If 
William the Red inherited much of his father's energy as well as. 
his policy toward the conquered English, he inherited none of his 
moral grandeur. His profligacy and extravagance soon exhausted 
the royal hoard, and the death of Lanfranc left him free to fill it at 
the expense of the Church. During the vacancy of a see or abbey 
its revenues went to the royal treasury; and so steadily did Wil- 
liam refuse to appoint successors to the prelates whom death had 
removed, that at the close of his reign one archbishopric, four 
bishoprics, and eleven abbeys were found to be without pastors. 
The see of Canterbury itself remained vacant till a dangerous ill- 
ness frightened the King into the promotion of Anselm, who hap- 
pened at the time to be in England on the business of his house. 
The Abbot of Bee was dragged to the royal couch, and the cross 
forced into his hands ; but William had no sooner recovered from 
his sickness than he found himself face to face with an opponent 
whose meek and loving temper .rose into firmness and grandeur 
when it fronted the tyranny of the King. The Conquest, as we 
have seen, had robbed the Church of all moral power as the repre- 
sentative of the higher national interests against a brutal despotism, 
by placing it in a position of mere dependence on the Crown ; and, 
though the struggle between William and the Archbishop turned, 
for the most part, on points which have no direct bearing on our 
history, the boldness of Anselm's attitude not only broke the tradi- 
tion of ecclesiastical servitude, but infused through the nation at 
large a new spirit of independence. The real character of the con- 
test appears in the Primate's answer, when his remonstrances 
against the lawless exactions from^^ the Church were met by a de- 
mand for a present on his own promotion, and his first offer of five 
hundred pounds was contemptuously refused. " Treat me as a free 
man," Anselm replied, " and I devote myself and all that I have to 
your service ; but if you treat me as a slave, you shall have neither 
me nor mine." A burst of the Red King's fury drove the Arch- 
bishop from court, and he finally decided-te-quit the country ; but 
his example had not been lost, and the close of William's reign 
found a new spirit of freedom in England with which the greatest 
of the Conqueror's sons was glad to make terms. 

As a soldier, the Red King was little inferior to his father. Nor- 
mandy had been sold to him by his brother Robert in exchange for a 



IL] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



119 



sum which enabled the Duke to march in the" first Crusade for the 
delivery of the Holy Land, and a rebellion at LeMans was subdued 
by the fierce energy with which William had flung himself, at the 
news of it, into the first boat he had found, and crossed the Channel 
in face of a storm. " Kings never drown," he replied, contemptuous- 
ly, to the remonstrances of his followers. Homage was again wrested 
from Malcolm by a march to the Firth of Forth, and the subsequent 
death of the King threw Scotland into a disorder which enabled an 
army under Eadgar ^theling to establish Edward, the son of Mar- 
garet, as an English feudatory on the throne.,' In Wale^ William 
was less triumphant, and the terrible losses inflicted on the heavy 
Norman cavalry in the fastnesses of Snowdon forced him to fall 
back on the slower but wiser policy of the Conqueror. Triumph 
and defeat alike ended in a strange and tragical close ; the Red 
King was found dead by peasants in a glade of the New Forest, 
with the arrow either of a hunter or an assassin in his breast. Rob- 
ert was still on his return from the Holy Land, where his bravery 
had redeemed much of his earlier ill-fame, and the English crown 
was at once seized by his younger brother Henry, in spite of the 
opposition of the baronage, who clung to the Duke of Normandy 
and the union of their estates on both sides the Channel under a 
single ruler. Their attitude threw Henry, as it had thrown Rufus, 
on the support of the English, and the two great measures which 
followed his coronation mark the new relation which was thus 
brought about between the people and their King. Henry's Charter 
is important, not merely as the direct precedent for the Great Char- 
ter of John, but as the first limitation which had been imposed on 
the despotism established by the Conquest. The "evil customs" 
by which the Red King had enslaved and plundered the Church 
were explicitly renounced in it, the unlimited demands made by 
both the Conqueror and his son on the baronage exchanged for cus- 
tomary fees, while the rights of the people itself, though recognized 
more vaguely, were not forgotten. The barons were held to do 
justice to their under-tenants and to renounce tyrannical exactions 
from them, the King promising to restore order and the "law of 
Eadward," the old constitution of the realm, Avith the changes which 
his father had introduced. His marriage gave a significance to 
these promises Avhich the meanest English peasant could understand. 
Edith, or Matilda, was the daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland 
and of Margaret, the sister of Eadgar ^theling. She had been 
brought up in the nunnery of Romsey by its abbess, her aunt Chris- 
tina, and the veil which she had taken there formed an obstacle to 
her union with the King, which was only removed by the wisdom 
of Anselna. The Archbishoi^'s recall had been one of Henry's first 
acts after his accession, and Matilda appeared before his Court to 
tell her tale in words of passionate earnestness. She had been veiled 
in her childhood, she asserted, only to save her from the insults of 
the rude soldiery who infested the land, had flung the veil from her 
again and again, and had yielded at last to the unwomanly taunts, 
the actual blows of her aunt. "As often as I stood in her pres- 



120 



HISTORY OF TSE ENGLISH FEOFLE. 



[Chap. 



ence," the girl pleaded passionately to the saintly Primate, " I wore 
the veil, trembling as I wore it with indignation and grief. But 
as soon as I could get out of her sight I used to snatch it from my 
head, fling it on the ground, and trample it underfoot. That was 
the way, and none other, in which I was veiled." Anselm at once 
declared her free from conventual bonds, and the shout of the En- 
glish multitude when he set the crown on Matilda's brow drowned 
the murmur of churchman or of baron. The taunts of the ISTorman 
nobles who nicknamed the King and his spouse " Farmer Godric 
and his ^mmer Godgifu," were lost in the joy of the people- at 
large. For the first time since the Conquest, an English sovereign 
sat on the English throne. The blood of Cerdic and -Alfred was to 
blend itself with that of Hrolf and the Conqueror. It was impossi- 
ble that the two peoples should henceforth be severed from one an- 
other, and their fusion 2:)roceeded so rapidly that the name of E'or- 
man had passed away at the accession of Henry the Second, and the 
descendants of the victors at Senlac boasted themselves to be En- 
glishmen, 

We can dimly trace the progress of this blending of the two races 
together in the case of the burgher population in the towns. 

One immediate result of the Conquest had been a great immigra- 
tion into England from the Continent. A peaceful invasion of the 
industrial and trading classes of Normandy followed quick on the 
conquest of the Norman soldiery. Every Norman noble as he quar- 
tered himself upon English lands, every Norman abbot as he enter- 
ed his English cloister, gathered French artists or French domestics 
around his new castle or his new church. Around the Abbey of Bat- 
tle, for instance, which William had founded on the site of his great 
victory, "Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver, Benet the Stew- 
ard, Hugh the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor," mixed with the En- 
glish tenantry. More especially was this the case with the capital. 
Long before the landing of William the Normans had had mercantile 
establishments in London. Their settlement would naturally have 
remained a mere trading colony, but London had no sooner submit- 
ted to the Conqueror than " many of the citizens of Rouen and Caen 
passed over thither, preferring to be dwellers in this city, inasmuch 
as it was fitter for their trading, and better stored with the merchan- 
dise in which they were wont to traffic." At Norwich and elsewhere 
the French colony isolated itself in a separate French town, side by 
side with the English borough. In London it seems to have taken 
at once the position of a governing class. The name of Gilbert 
Beket, the father of the famous Archbishop, is one of the few that 
remain to us of the portreeves of London, the predecessors of its 
mayors ; he held in Stephen's time a large property in houses with- 
in the walls, and a proof of his civic importance was preserved in 
the annual visit of each newly-elected chief magistrate to his tomb 
in the little chapel which he had founded in the church-yard of St. 
Paul's. Yet Gilbert was one of the Norman strangers who follow- 
ed in the wake of the Conqueror; he was by birth a burgher of 
Rouen, as his wife was of a burgher family from Caen. It was part- 



n.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOEEIGN KINGS. 



121 



ly to this infusion of foreign blood, partly no doubt to the long in- 
ternal peace and order secured by the Norman rule, that the En- 
glish towns owed the wealth and importance to which they attained 
during the reign of Henry the First. In the silent growth and ele- 
vation of the English people the boroughs led the way : unnoticed 
and despised by prelate and noble, they had alone preserved the 
full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The rights of self-government, 
of free speech in free meeting, of equal justice by one's equals, 
were brought safely across the ages of Norman tyranny by the 
traders and shop-keepers of the towns. In the quiet, quaintly 
named streets, in town-mead and market-place, in the lord's mill 
beside the stream, in the bell that swung out its summons to the 
crowded borough-mote, in the jealousies of craftsmen and guilds, 
lay the real life of Englishmen, the life of their home and trade, 
their ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression, their steady, un- 
wearied battle for self-government. It is diilicult to trace the 
steps by which borough after borough won its freedom. The bulk 
of them were situated in the royal demesne, and, like other tenants, 
their customary rents were collected and justice administered by a 
royal officer. Among such towns London stood chief, and the 
charter which Henry granted it became the model for the rest. 
The King yielded the citizens the right of justice; every towns- 
man could claim to be tried by his fellow-townsmen in the town- 
courts or hustings, whose sessions took place every week. They 
were subject only to the old English trial by oath, and exempt from 
the trial by battle, which the Normans had introduced. Their 
trade was protected from toll or exaction over the length and 
breadth of the land. The King however still nominated, in London 
as elsewhere, the portreeve, or magistrate of the town, nor were 
the citizens as yet united together in a commune or corporation ; 
but an imperfect civic organization existed in the "wai'ds" or 
quarters of the town, each governed by its own alderman, and 
in the " guilds" or voluntary associations of merchants or traders 
which insured order and mutual protection for their members. 
Loose, too, as these bonds may seem, they were drawn firmly 
together by the older English traditions of freedom which the 
towns preserved. In London, for instance, the burgesses gathered 
in town-mote when the bell swung out from St. Paul's to deliberate 
freely on their own affairs under the presidency of their aldermen. 
Here, too, they mustered in arms if danger threatened the city, and 
delivered the city banner to their captain, the Norman baron Fitz- 
Walter, to lead them against the enemy. Few boroughs had as yet 
attained to power such as this, but charter after charter during 
Henry's reign raised the townsmen of boroughs from mere traders, 
wholly at the mercy of their lord, into customary tenants, who 
had purchased their freedom by a fixed rent, regulated their own 
trade, and enjoyed exemption from all but their own justice. 

The advance of towns which had grown up not on the royal 
domain but around abbey or castle was sloAver and more difficult. 
The story of St. Edmundsbury shows how gradual was the transi- 



122 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



tion from pure serfage to an imperfect freedom. Much that had 
been plow -land in the time of the Confessor was covered with 
houses under the Norman rule. The building of the great abbey- 
church drew its craftsmen and masons to mingle with the plow- 
men and reapers of the abbot's domain. The troubles of the time 
helped here as elsewhere the progress of the town ; serfs, fugitives 
from justice or their lord, the trader, the Jew, naturally sought shel- 
ter under the strong hand of St. Edmund. But the settlers were 
wholly at the abbot's raercy. Not a settler but was bound to pay 
his pence to the abbot's treasury, to plow a rood of his land, to reap 
in his harvest-field, to fold his sheep in the abbey folds, to help 
bring the annual catch of eels from the abbey waters. Within the 
four crosses that bounded the abbot's domain, land and water were 
his ; the cattle of the townsmen paid for their pasture on the com- 
mon ; if the fullers refused the loan of their cloth, the cellarer 
would refuse the use of the stream, and seize their looms wherever 
he found them. No toll might be levied of purchasers from the 
abbey farms, and customers had to wait before shop and stall till 
the buyers of the abbot had had the pick of the market. There 
was little chance of redress, for if burghers complained in folk- 
mote, it was before the abbot's officers that its meeting was held ; 
if they appealed to the alderman, he was the abbot's nominee, and 
received the horn, the symbol of his office, at the abbot's hands. 
Like all the greater revolutions of society, the advance from tins 
mere serfage was a silent one ; indeed its more galling instances of 
oppression seem to have slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the 
eel-fishing, were commuted for an easy rent ; others, like the slavery 
of the fullers and the toll of flax, simply disappeared. By usage, 
by omission, by downright forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, 
there by a present to a needy abbot, the town won freedom. But 
progress was not always unconscious, and one incident in tlie his- 
tory of St. Edmundsbury is remarkable, not merely as indicating the 
advance of law, but yet more as marking the part which a new 
moral sense of man's right to equal justice was to play in the gen- 
eral advance of the realm. Rude as the borough was, it had pre- 
served its right of meeting in full assembly of the townsmen for 
government and law. Justice was administered in presence of the 
burgesses, and^ the accused acquitted or condemned by the oath of 
his neighbors. ''^ Without the borough bounds, however, the system 
of the Norman judicature prevailed, and the rural tenants v/lio did 
suit and service at the cellarer's court were subject to the decision 
of the trial by battle. The execution of a farmer named Kebel, 
who was subject to this feudal jurisdiction, brought the two sys- 
tems into vivid contrast. He seems to have been guiltless of the 
crime laid to his charge, but the duel went against him, and he was 
hung just without the gates. The taunts of the townsmen woke 
his fellow-farmers to a sense of wrong. " Had Kebel been a dwell- 
er within the borough," said the burgesses, " he would have got 
his acquittal from the oaths of his neighbors, as our liberty is ;" and 
even the monks were moved to a decision that their tenants should 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



123 



enjoy equal liberty and justice with the townsmen. The franchise 
of the town was extended to the rural possessions of the abbey 
without it, the farmers " came to the toll-house, were written in the 
alderman's roll, and paid the town-penny." 

The moral revolution which events like this indicate was back- 
ed by a religious revival which forms a marked feature in the 
reign of Henry the First. Pious, learned, and energetic as the 
bishops of William's appointment had been, they were not English- 
men. Till Beket's time, no Englishman had occuj)ied the throne of 
Canterbury ; till Jocelyn, in the reign of John, no Englishman had 
occupied the see of Wells. In language, in manner, in sympathy, the 
higher clergy were thus completely severed from the lower priest- 
hood and the people, and the whole influence of the Church, consti 
jtutional as well as religious, was for the moment paralyzed. Lan- 
franc indeed exercised a great personal influence over William, but 
Anselm stood alone against Rufus, and no voice of ecclesiastical 
freedom broke the simoniac silence of the reign of Henry the First. 
But at the close of the latter reign and throughout that of Stephen, 
the people, left thus without shepherds, was stirred by the first of 
those great religious movements which England was to experience 
afterward in the preaching of the friars, the LoUardism of Wyclif, 
the Reformation, the Puritan enthusiasm, and the mission work of 
the Wesleys. Every where in town and country men banded 
themselves together for prayer, hermits flocked to the woods, noble 
and churl welcomed the austere Cistercians, a reformed outshoot of 
the Benedictine order, as they spread over the moors and forests of 
the North, A new spirit of devotion woke the slumber of the re- 
ligious houses, and penetrated alike to the home of the noble Wal- 
ter d'Espec at Rievaulx, or of the trader Gilbert Beket in Cheap- 
side. London took its full share in the great revival. The city 
was proud of its religion, its thirteen conventual and more than a 
hundred parochial churches. The new impulse changed, in fact, 
its very aspect. In the midst of the city Bishop Richard busied 
himself with the vast cathedral which Bishop Maurice had begun ; 
barges came up the river with stone from Caen for the great arch- 
es that moved the popular wonder, while street and lane were being 
leveled to make space for the famous Church-yard of St. Paul's. 
Rahere, the King's minstrel, raised the priory of St. Bartholomew 
beside Smithfield. Alfune built St. Giles's at Cripplegate. The old 
English Cnihtena Guild surrendered their soke of Aldgate as a site 
for the new priory of the Holy Trinity. The tale of this house 
paints admirably the temper of the citizens at this time. Its found- 
er. Prior ISTorman, had built church and cloister and bought books 
and vestments in so liberal a fashion that at last no money remain- 
ed to buy bread. The canons were at their last gasp when many 
of the city folk, looking into the refectory as they paced round the 
cloister in their usual Sunday procession, saw the tables laid, but 
not a single loaf on them. " Here is a fine set-out," cried the citi- 
zens, " but where is the bread to come from ?" The women pres- 
ent vowed to bring a loaf every Sunday, and thei'e was soon bread 



SEa VI. 

The ENdLisii 
Kbvital. 

1071- 
1127. 

The 
religious 
re'vival. 



124 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



The English 
Reviyal. 

1071- 
112'?. 



enough and to spare for the priory and its guests. We see the 
strength of the new movement in the new class of ecclesiastics that 
it forces on the stage ; men like Anselm or John of Salisbury, or 
the two great prelates who followed one another after Henry's death 
in the see of Canterbury, Theobald and Thomas, derived whatever 
might they possessed from sheer holiness of life or unselfishness of 
aim. The revival left its stamp on the fabric of the constitution it- 
self : the paralysis of the Church ceased as the new impulse bound 
the prelacy and people together, and its action, when at the end of 
Henry's reign it started into a power strong enough to save En- 
gland" from anarchy, has been felt in our history ever since. 

From this revival of English feeling Henry himself stood jeal- 
ously aloof; but the enthusiasm which his marriage had excited 
enabled him to defy the claims of his brother and the disaffec- 
tion of his nobles. Robert landed like his father at Pevensey, to 
find himself face to face with an English array which Anselm's 
summons had gathered round the King; and his retreat left Hen- 
ry free to deal sternly with the rebel barons. Robert of Belesme, 
the son of Roger of Montgomeiy, was now their chief; but 60,000 
English footmen followed the King through the rough passes 
which led to Shrewsbury, and an early surrender alone saved Rob- 
ert's life. Master of his own realm and enriched by the confis- 
cated lands of the revolted baronage, Henry crossed into Norman- 
dy, where the misgovernment of Robert had alienated the cler- 
gy and trades, and where the outrages of the Norman nobles 
forced the more peaceful classes to call the King to their aid. On 
the field of Tenchebray his forces met those of the Duke, and a de- 
cisive English victory on Norman soil avenged the shame of Hast- 
ings. The conquered duchy became an appanage of the English 
Crown, and Henry's energies were frittered away through a quarter 
of a century in crushing its revolts, the hostility of the French, and 
the efforts of his nephew, William, the son of Robert, to regain the 
crown which his father had lost at Tenchebray. In England, how- 
ever, all was peace, t The vigorous administration of Henry the 
First completed in fultest detail the system of government which 
the Conqueror had sketched. The vast estates which had fallen to 
the Crown through forfeiture and revolt were granted out to new 
men dependent on royal favor ; Avhile the towns were raised into a 
counterbalancing force to the feudalism of the country by the grant 
of charters and the foundation of trade-guilds. A new organiza- 
tion of justice and finance bound the kingdom together under the 
royal administration. The clerks of the Royal Chapel were form- 
ed into a body of secretaries or royal ministers, whose head bore 
the title of chancellor. Above them stood the Justiciar, or Lieu- 
tenant-general of the kingdom, who in the frequent absence of the 
King acted as Regent of the realm, and whose staff, selected from 
the barons connected with the royal household, were formed into a 
Supreme Court of Appeal. The King's Court, as this was called, 
permanently represented the whole court of royal vassals, which 
had hitherto been summoned thrice in the year. As the Royal- 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOBEIGN KINGS. 



125 



Council, it revised and registered laws, and its " counsel and con- 
sent," though merely formal, preserved the principle of the older 
popular legislation. As a court of justice it formed the highest 
court of appeal : it could call up any suit from a lower tribunal on 
the application of a suitor, while the union of several sheriffdoms 
under one of its members connected it closely with the local courts. 
As a financial body, its chief work lay in the assessment and collec- 
tion of the revenue. In this capacity it took the name of the Court 
of Exchequer, from the chequered table, much like a chess-board, 
at which it sat, and on which accounts were rendered. In their 
financial capacity its justices became "barons of the Exchequer." 
Twice every year the sheriff of each county appeared before these 
barons and rendered the sum of the fixed rent from royal domains, 
the Danegeld or tax, the fines of the local courts, the feudal aids 
from the baronial estates, which foi'med the chief part of the royal 
revenue. Local disputes respecting these payments or the assess- 
ment of the town-rent were settled by a detachment of barons from 
the court, who made the circuit of the shires, and whose fiscal visit- 
ations led to the judicial visitations, the "judges' circuits," which 
still form so marked a feature in our legal system. 

From this work of internal reform Henry's attention was called 
suddenly by one terrible loss to the question of the succession to 
the throne. His son William " the JEtheling," as the English fond- 
ly styled the child of their own Matilda, had with a crowd of nobles 
accompanied the King on his return from Normandy; but the 
White Ship in which he had embarked lingered behind the rest of 
the royal fleet, while the young nobles, excited with wine, hung over 
the ship's side and chased away with taunts the priest who came 
to give the customaiy benediction. At last the guards of the 
King's treasure pressed the vessel's departure, and, driven by the 
arms of fifty rowers, it swept swiftly out to sea. All at once the 
ship's side struck on a rock at the mouth of the harbor, and in an 
instant it sank beneath the waves. One terrible cry, ringing through 
the stillness of the night, was heard by the royal fleet, but it was 
not till the morning that the fatal news reached the King. He fell 
unconscious to the ground, and rose never to smile again. Henry 
had no other son, and the whole circle of his foreign foes closed 
round him the more fiercely that the son of Robert was now his 
natural heir. The King hated William, while he loved Maud, the 
daughter who still remained to him, who had been married to the 
Emperor Henry the Fifth, and whose husband's death now restored 
her to her father. He recognized her as his heir, though the suc- 
cession of a woman seemed strange to the feudal baronage ; nobles 
and priests were forced to swear allegiance to her as their future 
mistress, and Heniy affianced her to the son of the one foe he really 
feared, the Count of Anjou. 



Sec. VI. 

THEENGiiisn 
Revival. 

1071- 
1127. 



The White 
Shii). 



Wreck of the 

White Ship, 

1120. 



126 



HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. Vn. 

England 

AND Anjou. 

870- 

1154. 



The 

Counts of 

AuJou. 



838. 



Section VII.— England and Anjou, 870—1154. 

{Authorities. — The chief documents for Angevin history have been collected in 
the "Chroniques d'Anjou," published by the Histoi'ical Society of France (Paris, 
1856). The best known of these is the "Gesta Comitum," a compilation of the 
twelfth centuiy (given also by DAcheiy, " Spicilegium," 4to., vol. x., p. 534), in 
which the earlier romantic traditions are simply dressed up into historical shape 
by copious quotations from the French historians. Save for the reigns of Geoffrv 
Martel, and Fulc of Jerusalem, it is nearly valueless. The short autobiography of 
Fulc liechin is the most authentic memorial of the earlier Angevin history ; and 
much can be gleaned from the verbose life of Geoffry the Handsome by John of 
Marmoutiers. For England, Orderic and the Chronicle die out in the midst of 
Stephen's reign ; here, too, end William of Malmesbury, Huntingdon, the " Gesta 
Stephani," a record in great detail by one of Stephen's clerks, and the Hexham 
Chroniclers, who are most valuable for its opening (published by Mr. Eaine for the 
Surtees Society). The blank in our historical literature extends over the first years 
of Henry the Second. The lives and letters of Beket have been industriously col- 
lected — in a disorderly way — and published by Dr. Giles.] 



To understand the history of England under its Angevin rulers, 
we must first know something of the Angevins themselves. The 
character and the policy of Henry the Second and his sons were as 
much a heritage of their race as the broad lands of Anjou. The 
fortunes of England were being slowly Avrought out in every inci- 
dent of the history of the counts, as the descendants of a Breton 
woodman became masters not of Anjou only, but of Touraine, 
Maine, and Poitou, of Gascony and Auvergne, of Acquitaiue and 
Normandy, and sovereigns at last of the great realm which Nor- 
mandy had won. The legend of the father of their races carries 
us back to the times of our own Alfred, when the Danes were rav- 
aging along Loire as they ravaged along Thames. In the heart of 
the Breton border, in the debatable land between France and Brit- 
tany, dwelt Tortulf the Forester, half brigand, half hunter as the 
gloomy days went, living in free outlaw fashion in the woods about 
Rennes. Tortulf had learned in his rough forest school " how to 
strike the foe, to sleep on the bare ground, to bear hunger and toil, 
summer's heat and winter's frost, how to fear nothing save ill fame." 
Following King Charles the Bald in his struggle with the Danes, 
the woodman won broad lands along Loire, and his son Ingelger, 
who had swept the Northmen from Touraine and the land to the 
west, which they had burned and wasted into a vast solitude, be- , 
came the first Count of Anjou. The second, Fulc the Red, attach- 
ed himself to the dukes of France, who were now drawing nearer 
to the throne, and received from them in guerdon the western por- 
tion of Anjou which lay across the Mayenne. The story of his son 
is a story of peace, breaking like a quiet idyll the war-storms of his 
house. Alone of his race Fulc the Good waged no wars ; his de- 
light was to sit in the choir of Tours and to be called " Canon." 
One Martinmas-eve Fulc was singing there in clerkly guise, when 
the King, Lewis d'Outremer, entered the church. " He sings like 
a priest," laughed the King, as his nobles pointed mockingly to the 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



127 



figui-e of the count -canon; but EiiJc was ready with his reply. 
" Know, my lord," wrote the Count of Anjou, " that a king unlearn- 
ed is a crowned ass." Fulc was in fact no priest, but a busy ruler, 
governing, enforcing peace, and carrying justice to every corner of 
the wasted land. To him alone of his race men gave the title of 
" the Good." 

Hampered by revolt, himself in character little more than a bold, 
dashing soldier, Fulc's son, Geoffry Grey-gown, sank almost into a 
vassal of his powerful neighbors, the Counts of Blois and Cham- 
pagne. The vassalage was roughly shaken off by his successor. 
Fulc Nerra, Fulc the Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first 
in whom we can trace that marked tyj)e of character which their 
house was to preserve with a fatal constancy through two hundred 
years. He was without natural affection. In his youth he burned 
a wife at the stake, and legend told how he led her to her doom 
decked out in his gayest attire. In his old age he waged his bitter- 
est war against his son, and exacted from him when vanquished 
a humiliation which men reserved for the deadliest of their foes. 
"You are conquered, you are conquered !" shouted the old man in 
fierce exultation, as Geoffry, bridled and saddled like a beast of 
burden, crawled for pardon to his father's feet. In Fulc first a]^- 
peared the low type of superstition which startled even supersti- 
tious ages in the early Plantagenets, a superstition based simply on 
terror and stripped of all j)oetry or belief. Robber as he was of 
Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical censures, the fear 
of the end of the world drove Fulc to the Holy Sepulchre. Bare- 
foot and with the strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his 
shoulders, the Count had himself dragged by a halter through the 
streets of Jerusalem, and courted the doom of martyrdom by his 
wild outcries of penitence. He rewarded the fidelity of Herbert of 
Le Mans, whose aid had saved him from utter ruin, by entrapping 
him into captivity and robbing him of his lands. He secured the 
terrified friendship of the French King by dispatching twelve as- 
sassins to cut down before his eyes the minister who had troubled it. 
Familiar as the age was with treason and rapine and blood, it recoil- 
ed from the cool cynicism of his crimes, and, believed the wrath of 
Heaven to have been revealed against the union of the worst forms 
of evil in Fulc the Black. But neither the Avrath of Heaven nor 
the curses of men broke with a single mishap the fifty years of his 
success. 

At his accession Anjou was the least important of the greater 
provinces of France. At his death it stood, if not in extent, at least 
in real power, first among them all. Cool-headed, clear-sighted, 
quick to resolve, quicker to strike, Fulc's career was one long series 
of victories over all his rivals. He was a consummate general, and 
he had the gift of personal bravery, which was denied to some of his 
greatest descendants. There was a moment in the first of his bat- 
tles when the day seemed lost for Anjou ; a feigned retreat of the 
Bretons had drawn the Angevin horsemen into a line of hidden 
pitfalls, and the Count himself was flung heavily to the ground. 



128 



EISTOEY OF THE UNGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Seo. vil 
Englaut) 

AND AnJOTJ, 

870- 
1154. 



Dragged from the medley of men and horses, he swept down al- 
most singly on the foe " as a storm-wind" (so rang the paean of the 
Angevins) " sweeps down on the thick corn rows," and the field was 
won. To these qualities of the warrior he added a power of polit- 
ical organization, a capacity for far-reaching combinations, a faculty 
of statesmanship, which became the heritage of the Angevins, and 
lifted them as high above the intellectual level of the rulers of their 
time as their shameless wickedness degraded them below the level 
of man. His overthrow of Brittany on the field of Conquereux 
was followed by the gradual absorption of Southern Touraine, while 
his restless activity covered the land with castles and abbeys. The 
very spirit of the Black Count seems still to frown from the dark 
tower of Duretal on the sunny valley of the Loire. His great vic- 
tory at Poutlevoi crushed the rival house of Blois; the seizure of 
Saumur completed his conquests in the South, while Northei*n Tou- 
raine was won bit by bit till only Tours resisted the Angevin. The 
treacherous seizure of its Count, Herbert Wake-dog, left Maine 
at his mercy ere the old man bequeathed his unfinished work to 
his son. As a warrior, Geoffry Martel was hardly inferior to his 
father. A decisive overthrow wrested Tours from the Count of 
Blois ; a second left Poitou at his mercy ; and the seizure of Le 
Mans brought him to the Norman border. Here, as we have seen, 
his advance was checked by the genius of William the Conqueror, 
and with his death the greatness of Anjou seemed for the time' to 
have come to an end. 

Strij)ped of Maine by the Normans, and weakened by internal 
dissensions, the weak and profligate administration of Fulc Rechin 
left Anjou powerless against its rivals along the Seine. It woke 
to fresh energy with the accession of his son, Fulc of Jerusalem. 
Now urging the turbulent Norman noblesse to revolt against the 
justice of their king, now supporting the Clito in his struggle against 
his uncle, offering himself throughout as the one support of France, 
hemmed in as it was on all sides by the forces of Normandy and its 
allies, the Counts of Blois and Champagne, Fulc was the one enemy 
whom Heniy the First really feared. It was to disarm his restless 
hostility that the King yielded to his son, GeofEry the Handsome, the 
hand of his daughter Matilda. No marriage could have been more 
unpopular, and the secrecy with which it was effected was held by the 
barons as freeing them from the oath which they had sworn ; for no 
baron could give a husband to his daughter, if he was without sons, 
save by his lord's consent, and by a strained analogy the barons 
contended that their own assent was necessary for the marriage of 
Maud. A more pressing danger lay in the greed of her husband 
Geoffry, who, from his habit of wearing the common broom of An- 
jou (the planta genista) in his helmet, had acquired, in addition to 
his surname of " the Handsome," the more famous title of " Plantag- 
enet." His claims ended at last in intrigues with the Norman no- 
bles, and Henry hurried to the border to meet an expected invasion, 
but the plot broke down at his presence, the Angevins withdrew, 
and the old man withdrew to the forest of Lyons to die. 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



129 



" God give him," wrote the Archbishop of Rouen from Henry's 
death-bed, " the peace he loved." With him indeed closed the long 
peace of the Norman rule. An outburst of anarchy followed on the 
news of his departure, and in the midst of the turmoil Earl Stephen, 
his nephew, appeared at the gates of London. Stephen was the 
son of the Conqueror's daughter, Adela, who had married a count 
of Blois; he had been brought up at the English court, and his 
claim as nearest male heir, save his brother, of the Conqueror's 
blood (for his cousin, the son of Robert, had fallen in Flanders) was 
supported by his personal popularity. Mere swordsman as he was, 
his good-humoi*, his generosity, his very prodigality made him a 
favorite with all. No noble, however, had as yet ventured to join 
him, nor had any town opened its gates, when London poured out 
to meet him with uproarious welcome. Neither barons nor prelates 
were present to constitute a National Council, but the great city 
did not hesitate to take their place. The voice of her citizens had 
long been accepted as representative of the popular assent in the 
election of a king ; but it marks the progress of English independ- 
ence under Henry that London now claimed of itself the right of 
election. Undismayed by the absence of the hereditary councilors 
of the Crown, its " aldermen and wise folk gathered together the 
folk-mote; and these providing at their own will for the good of 
the realm, unanimously resolved to choose a king." The solemn 
deliberation ended in the choice of Stephen : the citizens swore to 
defend the King with money and blood, Stephen swore to apply 
his whole strength to the pacification and good government of the 
realm. 

If London was true to her oath, Stephen was false to his. The 
twenty years of his reign are years of a misrule and disorder un- 
known in our history. Stephen had been acknowledged even by 
the partisans of Matilda, but his weakness and prodigality soon gave 
room to feudal revolt. Released from the stern hand of Henry, the 
barons fortified their castles, and their example was necessarily fol- 
lowed, in self-defense, by the great prelates and nobles who had 
acted as ministers to the late King. Roger, Bishop of Salisbmy, 
was at the head of this party, and Stephen, suddenly quitting his 
inaction, seized him at Oxford and flung him into prison till he had 
consented to surrender his forti-esses. The King's violence, while 
it cost him the support of the clergy, opened the way for Matilda's 
landing in England ; and the country was soon divided between the 
adherents of the two rivals, the West supporting Matilda, London 
and the East Stephen. A defeat at Lincoln left the latter a captive 
in the hands of his enemies ; Matilda entered London, and was re- 
ceived throughout the land as its " lady ;" but the disdain with which 
she repulsed the claim of the city to the enjoyment of its older priv- 
ileges roused its burghers to arms. Flying to' Oxford, she was be- 
sieged there by Stephen, who had obtained his release ; but she es- 
caped in white robes by a postern, and crossing the river unob- 
served on the ice, made her way to Abingdon, to return some years 
after to Normandy. The war had, in fact, become a mere chaos 

9 



Seo. viz. 

England 

AND Anjou. 

870- 

1154. 

Stephen 
of Blois. 



Steplien 

and the 

baronage. 



1141. 



1142. 
114C. 



130 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of pillage and bloodshed. The outrages of the feudal baronage 
showed from what horrors the Norman rule Ijad so long saved 
England. No more ghastly picture of a nation's misery has ever 
been painted than that which closes the English Chronicle, whose 
last accents falter out amid the horrors of the time : " They 
hanged up men by their feet and smoked them with foul smoke. 
Some were hanged up by their thumbs, others by the head, and 
burning tilings were hung on to their feet. They put knotted 
strings about their head and writhed them till they went into 
the brain. They put men into prisons where adders and snakes 
and toads were crawling, and so they tormented them. Some 
they put into a chest, short and narrow and not deep, and that had 
sharp stones within, and forced men therein so that they broke all 
their limbs. In many of the castles were hateful and grim things 
called rachenteges, which two or three men had enough to do to 
carry. It was thus made : it was fastened to a beam, and had a 
sharp iron to go about a man's neck and throat, so that he might 
noways sit, or lie, or sleep, but he bore all the iron. Many thou- 
sands they afflicted with hunger." One gleam of national glory 
broke the darkness of the time. King David of Scotland stood 
first among the partisans of his kinswoman Matilda, and on the ac- 
cession of Stephen his army crossed the border to enforce her claim. 
The pillage and cruelties of the wild tribes of Galloway and <the 
Highlands roused the spirit of the North: baron and freeman 
gathered at York round Archbishop Thurstan, and marched to the 
field of Northallerton to await the foe. The sacred banners of St. 
Cuthbert of Durham, St. Peter of York, St. John of Beverley, and 
St. Wilfred of Ripon hung from a pole fixed in a four-wheeled car 
which stood in the centre of the host. " I who wear no armor," 
shouted the chief of the Galwegians, " will go as far this day as any 
one with breastplate of mail ;" his men charged with wild shouts 
of " Albin, Albin," and were followed by the Norman knighthood of 
the Lowlands. The rout, however, v/as complete ; the fierce hordes 
dashed in vain against the close English ranks around the standard, 
and the whole army fled in confusion to Carlisle. 

England was rescued from this chaos of misrule by the efforts of 
the Church. In the early part of Stephen's reign his brother Hen- 
ry, the Bishop of Winchester, acting as papal legate for the realm, 
had striven to supply the absence of any royal or national authority 
by convening synods of bishops, and by asserting the moral right 
of the Church to declare sovereigns unworthy of the throne. The 
compact between king and people had become a part of constitu- 
tional law in the Charter of Henry, but its legitimate consequence 
in the responsibility of the Crown for the execution of the compact 
was first drawn out by these ecclesiastical councils. From their 
alternate depositions* of Stephen and Matilda flowed the after-depo- 
sitions of Edward and Richard, and the solemn act by which the 
succession was changed in the case of James. Extravagant and 
unauthorized as their expression of it may appear, they did express 
the right of a nation to good government. Henry of Winchester, 







4 Russell &Sualhors N.Y. 



II] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



131 



however, " half monk, half soldier," as he was called, possessed too 
little reiigioiis influence to wield a really spiritual power; it was 
only at the close of Stephen's reign that the nation really found a 
moral leader in Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury. " To 
the Church," Thomas justly said afterward, with the proud con- 
sciousness of having been Theobald's right hand, " Henry owed his 
crown, and England her deliverance," Thomas was the son of Gil- 
bert Beket, the Portreeve of London, the site of whose house is 
still marked by the Mercers' chapel in Cheapside; his mother Ro- 
hese was the type of the devout woman of her day, and weighed 
her boy each year on his birthday against money, clothes, and pro- 
visions which she gave to the poor. Thomas grew uja amid the 
Norman barons and clerks who frequented his father's house with 
a genial freedom of character tempered by the Norman refinement; 
he passed from the school of Merton to the University of Paris, 
and returned to fling himself into the life of the young nobles of 
the time. Tall, handsome, bright-eyed, ready of wit and speech, his 
firmness of temper showed itself in his very sports; to rescue his 
hawk which had fallen into the water he once plunged into a mill- 
race, and was all but crushed by the wheel. The loss of his father's 
wealth drove him to the court of Archbishop Theobald, and he 
soon became the Primate's confidant in his plans for the rescue of 
England. Henry, the son of Matilda and Geoffry, had now by the 
death of his father become master of Normandy and Anjou, while 
by his marriage with its duchess, Eleanor of Poitou, he had added 
Acquitaine to his dominions. Thomas, as Theobald's agent, invited 
Heiu'y to appear in England, and on the Duke's landing the Arch- 
bishop interposed between the rival claimants to the crown. The 
Treaty of Wallingford abolished the evils of the long anarchy ; the 
castles were to be razed, the crown-lands resumed, the foreign mer- 
cenaries banished from the country. Stephen was recognized as 
King, and in turn acknowledged Henry as his heir. But a year 
had hardly j)assed when Stephen's death gave his rival the crown 



Section VHI.— Henry the Second, 1154—1189. 

[Authorities. — Up to the death of Archbishop Thomas we have only the letters of 
Beket himself, Foliot, and John of Salisbury, collected by Dr. Giles ; but this dearth 
is followed by a vast outburst of historical industry. From 1169 till 1192 our 
primary authority is the Chronicle known as that of Benedict of Peterboi-ough, ad- 
mirably edited by Professor Stubbs, who has shown the probability of its authorship 
being really due to the royal treasurer, Bishop Richard Fitz-Neal. It is continued 
to 1201 by Roger of Howden. Both are works of the highest value, and have been 
edited for the Rolls series by Professor Stubbs, whose pi'efaces have thrown a new 
light on the constitutional history of Henry's reign. The history by William of 
Newborough (which ends in 1198) is a work" of the classical school, like William of 
Malmesbury, but distinguished by its fairness and good sense. The chronicles of 
Ralf Niger, M-ith the additions of Ralf of Coggeshall, that of Gervase of Canterbury, 
the Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln (edited by Mr. Dimock), the voluminous works of 
Giraldus Cambrensis, now editing by Professor Brewer and Mr. Dimock, may be 
selected as especially useful amid the vast mass of materials for Henry's reign. I 
have given some account of these in the opening of the next chapter. Lord Lyttel- 



132 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ton's ' ' Life of Henry the Second" is a full and sober account of the time ; Canon 
Eobertson's biography of Beket is accurate, but hostile in tone. In his "Docu- 
ments" Professor Stubbs has printed the various "Assizes," and the "Dialogus de 
Scaccario," which explains the financial administration of the Curia Regis.] 



Young as he was, Henry mounted the throne with a resolute pur- 
pose of government which his reign carried steadily out. His prac- 
tical, serviceable frame suited the hardest worker of his time. 
There was something in his build and look, in the square stout 
frame, the fiery face, the close-cropped hair, the prominent eyes, the 
bull neck, the coarse strong hands, the bowed legs, that marked out 
the keen, stirring, coarse-fibred man of business. " He never sits 
down," said one who observed him closely ; " he is always on his 
legs from morning till night." Orderly in business, careless in ap- 
pearance, sparing in diet, never resting or giving his servants rest, 
chatty, inquisitive, endowed with a singular charm of address and 
strength of memory, obstinate in love or hatred, a fair scholar, a 
great hunter, his general air that of a rough, passionate, busy man, 
Henry's personal character told directly on the character of his 
reign. His accession marks the period of amalgamation, when 
neighborhood and traffic and intermarriage drew Englishmen and 
Normans so rapidly into a single people, that the two races soon 
cease to be distinguishable from one another. A national feelipig 
was thus springing up, before v/hich the barriers of the older feud- 
alism were to be swept away. Henry had even less reverence for 
the feudal past than the men of his day ; he was, indeed, utterly 
without the imagination and reverence which enabled men to sym- 
pathize with any past at all. He had a practical man's impatience 
of the obstacles thrown in the way of his reforms by the older con- 
stitution of the realm, nor could he understand other men's reluc- 
tance to purchase itndoubted improvements by the sacrifice of cus- 
toms and traditions of by-gone days. Without any theoretical hos- 
tility to the co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to him a per- 
fectly reasonable and natural course to trample either Baronage or 
Church underfoot to gain his end of good government. He saw 
clearly, that the remedy for such anarchy as England had endured 
under Stephen lay in the establishment of a kingly government un- 
embarrassed by any privileges of order or class, administered by 
royal servants, and in whose public administration the nobles acted 
simply as delegates of the sovereign. His work was to lie in the or- 
ganization of judicial and administrative forms which realized this 
idea, but of the great currents of thought and feeling which were 
tending in the same direction he knew nothing. What he did for 
the great moral and social revolution of his time was simply to 
let it alone. Religion grew more and more identified with patri- 
otism under the eyes of a king who whispered, and scribbled, and 
looked at picture-books during mass, who never confessed, and 
cursed God in wild frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples formed 
themselves on both sides of the sea round a sovereign who bent the 
whole force of his mind to hold together an empire which the 



11. ] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



133 



growth of nationality must inevitably destroy. There is through- 
out a tragic grandeur in the irony of Henry's position, that of a 
Sforza of the fifteenth century set in the midst of the twelfth, 
building up by patience and policy and craft a composite dominion, 
alien to the deepest sympathies of his age, and swept away in the 
end by popular forces to whose existence his very cleverness and 
activity blinded him. But indirectly, and unconsciously, his policy 
did more than that of all his predecessors to prepare England for 
the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal. 

He had been placed on the throne, as we have seen, by the Church. 
His first work was to repair the evils which England had endured 
till his accession by the restoration of the system of Henry the 
First ; and it was with the aid and counsel of Theobald that the 
foreign marauders Avere driven from the realm, the castles demolish- 
ed in spite of the opposition of the baronage, the King's Court and 
Exchequer restored. Age and infirmity, however, warned the Pri- 
mate to retire from the post of minister, and his power fell into the 
younger and more vigorous hands of Thomas Beket, who had long 
acted as his confidential adviser. Thomas, who now became Chan- 
cellor, won the personal favor of the King. The two young men 
had, in Theobald's words, " but one heart and mind ;" Henry jest- 
ed in the Chancellor's hall, or tore his cloak from his shoulders in 
rough horse-play as they rode through the streets. He loaded his 
favorite with riches and honors, but there is no ground for think- 
ing that Thomas in any degree influenced his system of rule. Hen- 
ry's policy seems, for good or evil, to have been throughout his 
own. As yet, his designs appeared to aim chiefly at power across 
the Channel, where he was already master of a third of our pres- 
ent France. He had inherited Anjou and Touraine from his fa- 
ther, Maine and Normandy from his mother, and the seven prov- 
inces of the South, Poitou, Saintonge, Auvergne, Perigord, the Li- 
mousin, the Angoumois, and Guienne, as the dowry of his wife. 
The actual dominions of Lewis the Seventh were far smaller than 
his own, and the tact of Beket had bound the French king to 
Henry's interests by securing for Henry's son the hand of Mar- 
guerite, the daughter of Lewis, and in default of sons the heir- 
ess of his realm. But even Lewis was roused to resistance when 
Henry prepared to enforce by arms his claims on Toulouse ; he 
threw himself into the town, and Henry, in spite of his Chancel- 
lor's remonstrances, at once withdrew. Thomas had fought brave- 
ly throughout the campaign, at the head of the VOO knights who 
formed his household, but the King had other work for him than 
war. On Theobald's death he at once forced on the monks of 
Canterbury, and on Thomas himself, his election as archbishop. 
His purpose in this appointment was soon revealed. Henry at once 
proposed to the bishops that a clerk, convicted of a crime, should 
be deprived of his orders, and handed over to the King's tribunals^ 
The local courts of the feudal baronage had been roughly shorn 
of their power by the judicial reforms of Henry the First, and the 
Church courts, as the Conqueror had created them, with their 



134 



HISTOBT OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



exclusive right of justice over the whole body of educated men 
throughout the realm, formed the one great exception to the system 
which was concentrating all jurisdiction in the hands of the King. 
The bishops yielded, but opposition came from the very prelate 
whom Henry had created to enforce his will. From the moment 
of his appointment Thomas had flung himself with the Avhole ener- 
gy of his nature into the part he had to play. At the first intima- 
tion of Henry's purpose he had pointed with a laugh to his gay at- 
tire: "You are choosing a fine dress to figure at the head of your 
Canterbury monks ;" but once monk and primate, he passed with a 
fevered earnestness from luxury to asceticism. Even as minister 
he had opposed the King's designs, and foretold their future op- 
position : " You will soon hate me as much as you love me now," 
he said, " for you assume an authority in the affairs of the Church 
to which I shall never assent." A prudent man might have doubt- 
ed the wisdom of destroying the only shelter which protected piety 
or learning against a despot like the Red King, and in the mind of 
Thomas the ecclesiastical immunities were parts of the sacred her- 
itage of the Church. He stood without support ; the Pope advised 
concession, the bishops forsook him, and Thomas bent at last to 
agx'ee to the constitutions, or Concordat between Church and State, 
which Henry presented to the Council of Clarendon. Many of its 
clauses were simply a re-enactment of the system established by the 
Conqueror. The election of bishop or abbot was to take place be- 
fore royal officers, in the King's chapel, and with the King's assent. 
The prelate elect was bound to do homage to the King for his lands 
before consecration, and to hold his lands as a barony from the 
King, subject to all feudal burdens of taxation and attendance in 
the King's Court. No bishop might leave the realm without the 
I'oyal permission. No tenant in chief or royal servant should be 
excommunicated, or their land placed under interdict, but by the 
King's assent. But the legislation respecting ecclesiastical jurisdic- 
tion was wholly new. The King's Court was to decide whether a 
suit between clerk and layman, whose nature was disputed, belong- 
ed to the Church courts or the King's. A royal officer was to be 
present in all ecclesiastical proceedings, in order to confine the Bish- 
op's Court within its own due limits, and a clerk once convicted 
there passed at once under the civil jurisdiction. An apj^eal was 
left from the Archbishop's Court to the King's Court for defect of 
justice. The privilege of sanctuary in churches or church-yards 
was repealed, so far as property and not persons was concerned. 
No serf's son could be admitted to orders without his lord's per- 
mission. After a passionate refusal, the Primate at last set his seal 
to the Constitutions, but his assent was soon retracted, and the 
King's savage resentment threw the whole moral advantage of the 
position into the Archbishop's hands. Vexatious charges were 
brought against him; in the Council of Northampton his life was 
said to be in danger, and all urged him to submit. But in the pres- 
ence of danger the courage of the man rose to its full height ; gi'asp- 
ing his archiepiscopal cross, he entered the royal court, forbade the 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



135 



nobles to condemn him, and appealed to the Papal See. Shouts of 
" Traitor ! traitor !" followed him as he retired. The Primate turn- 
ed fiercely at the word : " Were I a knight," he retorted, " my sword 
should answer that foul taunt." At night-fall he fled in disguise, 
and reached France through Flanders. For six years the contest 
raged bitterly ; at Rome, at Paris, the agents of the two powers in- 
trigued against each other. Henry stooped to acts of the meanest 
persecution in driving the Primate's kinsmen from England, and 
in confiscating the lands of their order till the monks of Pontigny 
should refuse Thomas a home; while Beket himself exhausted the 
patience of his friends by his violence and excommunications, as 
well as by the stubbornness with which he clung to the offensive 
clause, " saving the honor of my order," the addition of which would 
have practically neutralized the King's reforms. The Pope coun- 
seled mildness ; Lewis himself for a time withdrew his support ; his 
own clerks gave way at last. " Come up," said one of them bitter- 
ly when his horse stumbled on the road, " saving the honor of the 
Church and my order." But neither warning nor desertion moved 
the resolution of the Primate. Henry, in dread of papal excom- 
munication, resolved at last on the coronation of his son, in defiance 
of the privileges of Canterbury, by the Archbishop of York ; but 
the Pope's hands were now freed by his successes in Italy, and the 
threat of his interposition forced the King to a show of submission. 
The Archbishop was allowed to return after a reconciliation with 
the King at Fretheval, and the Kentishmen flocked around him 
with uproarious welcome as he entered Canterbury. " This is En- 
gland," said his clerks, as they saw the white headlands of the coast. 
" You will wish yourself elsewhere before fifty days are gone," said 
Thomas, sadly; and his foreboding showed his appreciation of 
Henry's character. Pie was now in the royal power, and orders 
had already been issued by the younger Henry for his arrest, when 
four knights from the King's Court, spurred to outrage by a pas- 
sionate outburst of their master's wrath, crossed the sea, and forced 
their way into the Archbishop's palace. After a stormy parley 
with him in his chamber they withdrew to arm, and Thomas was 
hurried by his clerks into the cathedral. As he reached the steps 
leading from the transept to the choir, his pursuers burst in, shout- 
ing from the cloisters. " Where," cried Reginald Fitzurse, in the 
dusk of the dimly lighted minster, " where is the traitor, Thomas 
Beket?" The Primate turned resolutely back: "Here am I; no 
traitor, but a priest of God," he replied ; and again descending the 
steps, he placed himself with his back against a pillar and fronted 
his foes. All the bravery, the violence of his old knightly life seem- 
ed to revive in Thomas as he tossed back the threats and demands 
of his assailants. "You are our prisoner," shouted Fitzurse, and 
the four knights seized him to drag him from the church. "Do 
not touch me, Reginald," shouted the Primate; "pander that you 
are, you owe me fealty;" and, avaiUng himself of his personal 
strength, he shook him roughly off. " Strike ! strike !" retorted 
Fitzurse; and blow after blow struck Thomas to the ground. A 



136 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



retainei- of Ranulf de Broc with the point of his sword scattered 
the Primate's brains on the ground. " Let us be off," he cried tri- 
umphantly ; " this traitor will never rise again." 

The brutal murder was received with a thrill of horror through- 
out Christendom ; miracles were wrought at the martyr's tomb ; he 
was canonized, and became the most popular of English saints; 
but Henry's active negotiations with the papacy averted the ex- 
communication which at first threatened to avenge the deed of 
blood. The Constitutions of Clarendon were in form partially an- 
nulled, and liberty of canonical election restored to bishoprics and 
abbacies. In reality, however, the victory remained with the King. 
Throughout his reign ecclesiastical appointments were practically 
in his hands, the bishops remained faithful to the royal cause, while 
the King's Court asserted its power over the episcopal jurisdiction. 
The close of the great struggle left Henry free to complete his 
great work of legal reform. He had already availed himself of the 
expedition against Toulouse to deliver a crushing blow at the 
baronage by the commutation of their personal services in the field 
for a money payment, a " scutage," or " shield money," for each 
fief. The King thus became master of resources which enabled 
him to dispense with the mihtary support of his tenants, and to 
maintain a force of mercenary soldiers in their place. The diminu- 
tion of the military power of the nobles had been accompanied by 
measures which robbed them of their legal jurisdiction. The cir- 
cuits of the judges were restored, and instructions were given them 
to enter the manors of the barons and make inquiry into their 
privileges ; while the office of sheriff was withdrawn from the 
great nobles of the shire and intrusted to the lawyers and courtiers 
who already furnished the staff of justices. The resentment of the 
barons found an opportunity of displaying itself when the King's 
eldest son, Avhose coronation had played so great a part in the his- 
tory of Archbishop Thomas, suddenly took refuge with the King of 
France, and demanded to be put in possession of his English realm. 
France, Flanders, and Scotland joined the league against Henry, 
a French army appeared beneath the walls of Rouen, while the 
King's younger sons, Richard and Geoffry, took up arms in Acqui- 
taine. In England a descent of Flemish mercenaries under the 
Earl of Leicester had been repulsed by the loyal justiciaries near 
St. Edmundsbury ; but Lewis had no sooner invaded ISTormandy 
than the whole extent of the danger was revealed. The Scots 
crossed the border, Roger de Mowbray rose in revolt in Yorkshire, 
Earl Ferrars in the midland shires, Hugh Bigod in the eastern 
counties, while a Flemish fleet prepared to support the insurrection 
by a descent upon the coast. The murder of Archbishop Thomas 
still hung around Henry's neck, and his first act in hurrying to 
meet these perils in England was to prostrate himself before the 
shrine of the new martyr, and to submit to a public scourging in 
expiation of his sin. But his penance was hardly wrought when 
all danger was dispelled by a series of triumphs. The King of 
Scotland, William the Lion, surprised by the English under cover 



11] 



ENGLAND UNBJEE FOREIGN KINGS. 



137 



of a mist, fell into the hands of his justiciary, Ranulf cie Glanvil, 
and at the retreat of the Scots the English rebels hastened to lay 
down their arms. With the army of mercenaries which he had 
brought to England, Henry was able to raise the siege of Rouen, 
and to reduce his sons to submission. The revolt of the baronage, 
easily as it had been subdued, became the pretext for fresh blows 
at their power. The greatest of these was his Assize of Arms, 
which restored the national militia to the place which it had lost 
at the Conquest. The substitution of scutage for military service 
had practically freed the Crown from the support of the baronage 
and their feudal retainers ; the Assize substituted for this feudal 
organization the older military obligation of every freeman to serve 
in the defense of the realm. Every knight was forced to arm him- 
self with coat of mail, and shield and lance ; every freeholder with 
lance and hauberk; every burgess and poorer freeman with lance 
and iron helmet. This universal levy of the armed nation was 
wholly at the disposal of the King for purposes of defense. 

The measures we have named Avere only part of Henry's legisla- 
tion. His reign, it has been truly said, "initiated the rule of law," 
as distinct from the despotism — tempered in the case of his grand- 
father by routine — of the earlier Norman kings. ( It was in suc- 
cessive "Assizes," bi'ief codes issued with the sanction of the great 
councils of barons and prelates he summoned year by year, that 
he perfected, by a system of reforms, the administrative measures 
which had begun with Henry the First. The fabric of our judicial 
legislation commences with the Assize of Clarendon, the first ob- 
ject of which was to pi'ovide for the order of the realm by reviving 
the old EngUsh system of mutual security, or frank- pledge. No 
stranger might abide in any place save a borough, and there but 
for a single night, unless sureties were given for his good behav- 
ior ; and the list of such strangers Avas to be submitted to the itin- 
erant justices. In the provisions of this assize for the repres- 
sion of crime Ave find the origin of trial by jury, so often attrib- 
uted to earlier times. Twelve laAvful men of each hundred, Avith 
four from each township, Avere sworn to present those who Avere 
knoAvn or reputed as criminals within their district for trial by 
ordeal. The jurors were thus not merely witnesses, but sworn to 
act as judges also in determining the value of the charge; and it is 
this double character of Henry's jurors that has descended to our 
" grand' j ury," who still remain chai-ged Avith the duty of present- 
ing criminals for trial after examination of the Avitnesses against 
them. Two later steps brought the jury to its modern condition. 
Under Edward the First, Avitnesses acquainted Avith the particular 
fact in question Avere added in each case to the general jury, and at 
a later time, by the separation of these tAVO classes of jurors, the last 
became simply "witnesses," without any jizdicial power, Avhile the 
first ceased to be Avitnesses at all, and, as our modern jurors, re- 
mained only judges of the testimony given. With tliis assize, too, 
the practice Avhich had prevailed from the earliest English times, 
of " compurgation," passed away. Under this system the accused 



138 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



could be acquitted of the charge by the voluntary oath of his neigh- 
bors and kinsmen ; but for the fifty years which followed the Assize 
of Clarendon his trial, after the investigation of the grand jury, 
was found solely in the ordeal or " judgment of God." Innocence 
could be proved by the power of holding hot iron in the hand, or by 
sinking when flung into the water, for swimming was a proof of 
guilt. The ordeal by battle or judicial combat introduced by the 
Normans had, as we have seen in the case of St. Edmundsbury, 
been confined to the feudal manors. It was the abolition of the 
whole system of ordeal by the Council of Lateran which led the 
way to the establishment of what is called a " petty jury" for the 
final trial of the prisoner. The Assize of Clarendon was expanded 
in that of Northampton, issued as instructions to the judges after 
the rebellion of the barons. Henry, as v/e have seen, had restored 
the King's Court and the occasional circuits of its justices : at the 
Council of Northampton he rendered this institution permanent 
and regular, by dividing the kingdom into six districts, to each of 
which he assigned three itinerant justices. The circuits thus de- 
fined correspond roughly Avith those that exist at the present day. 
The primary object of these circuits was undoubtedly financial, but 
the judicial functions of the judges were extended by the abolition 
of all feudal exemptions from their jurisdiction. The chief danger 
of the new system lay in the opportunities it afforded to judigial 
corruption; and so great were its abuses that Henry was soon 
forced to restrict for a time the number of justices to five — reserving 
appeals from their court to himself in council. It is from this Up- 
per Court of AjDpeal, which he thus erected, that the judicial pow- 
ers now exercised by the Privy Council are derived, as well as the 
equitable jurisdiction of the Chancellor. In the next century it be- 
comes the great council of the realm, from which the Privy Council 
drew its legislative, and the House of Lords its judicial, character. 
The Court of Star-Chamber and the Judicial Committee of the Privy 
Council are later offshoots of Henry's creation. The King's Court, 
which became inferior to this higher jurisdiction, divided after the 
Great Charter into the three distinct courts of the King's Bench, 
the Exchequer, and the Common Pleas, which by the close of the 
reign of Henry the Third received distinct judges, and became for 
all purposes separate. 

Henry was now in appearance thoroughly master of his domin- 
ions, and his invasion of Ireland had added that island to the pos- 
sessions of his English crown. But the course of triumph and 
legislation was rudely broken by the quarrels and revolts of his 
sons. The successive deaths of Henry and Geoffry were followed 
by intrigues between Richard, who had been intrusted with Ac- 
quitaine, and Philip, who had succeeded Lewis on the throne of 
France. The plot broke out at last in actual conflict ; Richard did 
homage to Philip, and the alUed forces suddenly appeared before 
Le Mans, from which Henry retreated in headlong flight toward 
Normandy. From a height where he halted to look back on the 
burning city, so dear to him as his birthplace, the old King hurled 



IL] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



139 



his curse against God : " Since Thou hast taken from me the town 
I loved best, where I was born and bred, and where ray father lies 
buried, I will have my revenge on Thee too — I will rob Thee of that 
thing Thou lovest most in me." Death was upon him, and the long- 
ing of a dying man drew him to the home of his race. Tours fell 
as he lay at Saumur, and the hunted King was driven to beg mercy 
from his foes. They gave him the list of the conspirators against 
him: at the head of them -was his youngest and best -loved son, 
John. " Now," he said, as he turned his face to the wall, " let 
things go as they will — I care no more for myself or for the world." 
He was borne to Chinon by the silvery waters of Vienne, and mut- 
terinp-, " Shame, shame on a conquered king," passed sullenly away. 



Section IX.— The Fall of the Angevins, 1189—1204. 

[Authorities.— In addition to those mentioned in the last section, the Chronicle 
of Eichai-d of Devizes, and the " Itinerarium Eegis Ricardi," edited by Professor 
Stubbs, are useful for Richard's reign. Rigord's "Gesta Philippi," and the "Phi- 
lippis" of Brito Arn)oricns, the chief authorities on the French side, are given in 
Duchesne, "Hist. Franc. Scriptores," vol. v.] 



We need not follow Richard in the Crusade which occupied the 
beginning of his reign, and which left England for four years with- 
out a ruler — in his quaiTcls in Sicily, his conquest of Cyprus, his 
victory ^t Jaffa, his fruitless march upon Jerusalem, the truce he 
concluded wnth Saladin, his shipwreck as he returned, or his two im- 
prisonments in Germany. Freed at last from his captivity, he found 
himself among dangers which he was too clear-sighted to under- 
value. Less wary than his fathei', less ingenious in his political con- 
ceptions than John, Richard was far from a mere soldier. [ A love 
of adventure, a pride in sheer physical strength, here and there a 
romantic generosity, jostled roughly with the craft, the unscrupulous- 
ness, the violence of his race ; but he was at heart a statesman, cool 
and patient in the execution of his plans as he was bold in their con- 
ception. "The devil is loose; take care of yourself," Philip had 
Avritten to John at the news of the King's release. In the French 
King's case a restless ambition was spurred to action by insults 
Avhich he had borne during the Crusade, and he had availed himself 
of Richard's imprisonment to invade l^ormandy. John, traitor to 
his brother as to his father, had joined his alliance ; while the Lords 
of Acquitaine rose in revolt under the troubadour Bertrand de 
Born. Jealousy of the rule of strangers, weariness of the turbu- 
lence of the mercenary soldiers of the Angevins or of the greed and 
oppression of their financial administration, combined with an im- 
patience of their firm government and vigorous justice to alienate 
the nohlesse of their provinces on the Continent. Loyalty among 
the people there was none ; even Anjou, the home of their race, drift- 
ed toward Philip as steadily as Poitou. England was drained by 
the tax for Richard's ransom, and irritated by his resumption on his 



140 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



return of all the sales by which he had raised funds for his Crusade; 
For some time he could do nothing but hold Philip in check on the 
Norman frontier, surprise his treasure at Fretheval, and reduce to 
submission the rebels of Acquitaine. A truce, which these suc- 
cesses wrested from Philip, gave him breathing - space for a final 
blow at his opponent. 

Extortion had wrung from England wealth which again filled 
the royal treasury, and Richard's bribes detached Flanders from 
the French alliance, and united the Counts of Chartres, Champagne, 
and Boulogne with the Bretons in a revolt against Philip, Otho, 
a nephew of Richard's, was now one of two rival claimants of the 
empire, and William Longchamp of Ely was busy knitting an alli- 
ance which would bring the German lances to bear on the King of 
Paris. But the security of Normandy was requisite to the success 
of these wider plans, and Richard saw that its defense coiald no 
longer rest on the loyalty of the Norman people. His father might 
trace his descent through Matilda from the line of Hrolf, but the 
Angevin ruler was in fact a stranger to the Norman. Nor did 
Henry appeal to his subjects' loyalty ; he held them, as he held his 
other provinces, by a strictly administrative bond, as a foreign mas- 
ter, and guarded their border with foreign troops. Richard only 
exaggerated his father's policy. It was impossible for a Norman 
to recognize his duke with any real sympathy in the Angevin prince 
whom he saw moving along the border at the head of Brabanyon 
mercenaries, in whose camp the old names of the Norman baronage 
were missing, and Merchade, a mere Gascon ruffian, held supreme 
command. The purely military site which Richard selected for the 
new fortress with which he guarded the border, showed his realiza- 
tion of the fact that Normandy could now only be held in a milita- 
ry way. As a monument of warlike skill, his " Saucy Castle," Cha- 
teau Gaillard, stands first among the fortresses of the Middle Ages. 
Richard fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in 
a great semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Ande- 
lys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs along its bank. Blue masses 
of woodland crown the distant hills; within the river curve lie 
a dull reach of flat meadow, round which the Seine, broken with 
green islets, and dappled with the gray and blue of the sky, flashes 
Tike a silver bow on its way to Rouen. The castle formed a part 
of an intrenched camp which Richard designed to cover his Nor- 
man capital. Approach by the river was blocked by a stockade 
and a bridge of boats, by a fort on the islet in mid-stream, and by 
the tower which the King built in the valley of the Gambcn, then 
an impassable marsh. In the angle between this valley and the 
Seine, on a spur of the chalk hills which only a narrow neck of land 
connects with the general plateau, rose, at the height of 300 feet 
above the river, the crowning fortress of the whole. Its outworks, 
and the walls which connected it with the town and stockade, have 
for the most part gone, but time and the hand of man have done 
little to destroy the fortifications themselves — the fosse, hewn deep 
into the solid rock, with casements hollowed out along its sides, the 



n.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



141 



fluted walls of the citadel, the huge donjon looking down on the 
brown roofs and huddled gables of Les Andelys. Even now, in its 
ruin, we can understand the triumphant outburst of its royal build- 
er as he saw it rising against the sky : " How pretty a child is mine, 
this child of but one year old !" 

The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of Chateau Gaillard 
at a later time proved Richard's foresight ; but foresight and sa- 
gacity were mingled in him with a brutal violence and a callous 
indifference to honor. The treaty which interrupted his war with 
Philip provided that Andelys should not be fortified, and three 
months after its ratification he was building his " Saucy Castle." 
*' I will take it, were its walls of iron," Philip exclaimed in wrath 
as he saw it rise. " I would hold it, were the walls of butter," was 
the defiant answer of his foe. It was Church land, and the Arch- 
bishop of Rouen laid Normandy under interdict at its seizure, but 
the King met the interdict with mockery, and intrigued with Rome 
till the censure was withdrawn. He was just as defiant of a "rain 
of blood," whose fall scared his courtiers. "Had an angel from 
heaven bid him abandon his work," says a cool observer, " he would 
have answered with a curse." The twelvemonth's hard work, in 
fact, by securing the Norman frontier, set Richard free to deal his 
long-meditated blow at Philip. Money only was wanting, and the 
King listened with more than the greed of his race to the rumor 
that a treasure had been found in the fields of the Limousin. 
Twelve knights of gold seated round a golden table were the find, 
it was said, of the Lord of Chaluz. Treasure-trove at any rate there 
was, and Richard prowled around the walls, but the castle held 
stubbornly out till the King's greed passed into savage menace ; 
he would hang all, he swore — man, woman, the very child at the 
breast. In the midst of his threats an arrow from the walls struck 
him down^\ He died as he had lived, pardoning with kingly gener- 
osity the archer who had shot him, outraging with bitter mockery 
the priests who exhorted him to repentance and restitution. 

The jealousy of pi'ovince against province broke out fiercely at 
his death. John was acknowledged as King in England and Nor- 
mandy, while Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did homage to Arthur, 
the son of his elder brother Geoffry, the late Duke of Brittany. 
The ambition of Philip, who protected his cause, turned the day 
against Arthur: the Angevins rose against the French garrisons 
, with which the French King practically annexed the country, and 
John was at last owned as master of the whole dominion of his 
house." , A fresh outbreak of war was fatal to his rival ; surprised 
at the feiege of Mirabeau by a rapid march of the King, Arthur 
was taken prisoner to Rouen, and murdered there, as men believed, 
by his uncle's hand. The brutal outrage at once roused Poitou in 
revolt, Anjou and Touraine welcomed Philip, and the French King 
marched straight on Normandy. The ease with which its conquest 
was effected is explained by the utter absence of any popular re- 
sistance on the part of the Normans themselves. Half a century 
before the siQ-ht of a Frenchman in the land would have roused 



Seo. IX. 
The Fall op 

THE 

Angevins. 
1189- 
1204. 

Kicliard's 
death. 



1199. 



The loss of 

Nor- 
mandy. 



1200. 



1203. 



142 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



The Fall of 

THE 

Angevins. 
1189- 
1204. 



every peasant to arms from Avranches to Dieppe ; but town after 
town surrendered at the mere summons of Philip, and the conquest 
was hardly over before Normandy settled down into the most loyal 
of the provinces of France. Much of this was due to the wise 
liberality with which Philip met the claims of the towns to inde- 
pendence and self-government, as well as to the overpowering force 
and military ability with which the conquest was effected. But 
the utter absence of all opposition sprang, as we have seen, from a 
deeper cause ; to the Norman, his transfer from John to Philip was 
a mere passing from one foreign master to another, and foreigner 
for foreigner Philip was the less alien of the two. Between France 
and Normandy there had been as many years of friendship as of 
strife; between Norman and Angevin lay a century of bitterest 
hate. Moreover, the subjection to France was the realization in 
fact of a dependence which had always existed in theory; Philip 
entered Rouen as the overlord of its dukes, while the submission to 
the house of Anjou had been the most humiliating of all submis- 
sions, the submission to an equal. 

It was the consciousness of this temper in the Norman people 
that forced John to abandon all hoj^e of resistance on the failure 
of his attempt to relieve Chateau Gaillard, by the siege of which 
Philip commenced his invasion. The skill with Avhich the com- 
bined movements for its relief were planned proves the King's mili- 
tary ability. The besiegers were parted into two masses by the 
Seine ; the bulk of their forces were camped in the level space 
within the bend of the river, while one division was thrown across 
it to occupy the valley of the Gambon, and sweep the country 
around of its provisions. John proposed to cut the French army 
in two by destroying the bridge of boats which formed the only 
communication between the two bodies, while the whole of his own 
forces flung themselves on the rear of the French division encamp- 
ed in the cul-de-sac formed by the river bend, and without any exit 
save the bridge. Had the attack been carried out as ably as it was 
planned, it must have ended in Philip's ruin ; but the two assaults 
were not made simultaneously, and were successively repulsed. 
The repulse was followed by the utter collapse of the rpilitary sys- 
tem by which the Angevins had held Normandy ; John's treasury 
was exhausted, and his mercenaries passed over to the foe. The 
King's despairing appeal to the duchy itself came too late; its 
nobles were already treating with Philip, and the towns were inca- 
pable of resisting the siege-train of the French. It was despair of 
any aid from Normandy that drove John over -sea to seek it as 
fruitlessly from England ; but with the fall of Chateau Gaillard, 
after a gallant struggle, the province passed without a struggle into 
the French King's hands. On its loss hung the destinies of En- 
gland; and the interest that attaches one to the grand ruin on the 
heights of Les Andelys is, that it represents the ruin of a system as 
well as of a camp. From its dark donjon and broken walls we see 
not merely the pleasant vale of Seine, but the sedgy flats of our 
own Runnymede. 



III.] 



THE GBEAT CHARTER. 



143 



CHAPTER III. 

THE GREAT CEARTEB. 



< 



1204—1265. 

Section I,— Englisli literature under the Norman and Angevin Kings. 

{^Authorities. — For the general literature of this period, see Mr. Morley's "En- 
glish Writers from the Conquest to Chaucer," vol. i., part ii. The prefaces of Mr. 
Bi-ewer and Mr. Dimock to his collected works in the Rolls Series give all that can 
be known of Gerald de Barri. The Poems of "Walter Map have been edited by Mr. 
Wright for the Camden Society : Layamon, by Sir F. Madden.] 



It is in a review of the literature of England during the period 
that we have just traversed that we shall best understand the 
new English people with which John, when driven from Nor- 
mandy, found himself face to face. 

In his contest with Beket, Henry the Second had been power- 
fully aided by the silent revolution which now began to part the 
purely literary class from the Church. During the earlier ages 
of our history we have seen literature springing up in ecclesiastic- 
al schools, and protecting itself against the ignorance and violence 
of the time under ecclesiastical privileges. With but two ex- 
ceptions, in fact, those of JElfred and Ethel weard, all our writers 
from Bseda to the days of the ^Angevins__are_j2lergy or monks. 
The revival of letters which followed the Conqu^x was a pure- 
ly ecclesiastical revival ; the intellectual impulse which B6c had 
given to Normandy traveled acro ss the Channel with the new 
Norman abbots who were established in the greater English mon- 
asteriesj_j3,nd writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the chief ^vorks 
of La tin liter ature, j jatristic or classical, were copied and illumi- 
nated, the lives of saTnts~Fompiled, and entries noted in the mo- 
nastic chronicle, formed from this time a part of every religious 
house of any importance. Fruitful of results as it had been in 
France, the philosophical and devotional impulse given by Anselm 
produced no English work of theology or metaphysics; it is char- 
acteristic of the national temper that the literary revival at once 
took the older historical form. At Durham, Turgot and Simeon 
threw into Latin shape the' national annals to the time of Henry 
the First, with an especial regard to Northern affairs ; while the 
earlier events of Stephen's reign were noted down by two Priors 
of Hexham in the wild border- land between England and the 
Scots. These, however, were the colorless jottings of mere annal- 
ists ; it Avas in the Scriptorium of Canterbury, in Osbern's lives 
of the English saints Dunstan and Elfeg, or in Eadmer's record 



144 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of the struggle of Anselm against the B.ed King and his successor, 
that we see the first indications of a distinctively English feeling 
telling on the new literature. The national impulse is yet more 
conspicuous in the two historians that followed. The war-songs 
of the English conquerors of Britain were preserved by Henry, 
the Archdeacon of Huntingdon, who wove them into annals com- 
piled from Bgeda and the Chronicle ; while William, the librarian 
of Malmesbury, has industriously collected the lighter ballads 
which embodied the popular traditions of the English Kings. 
The revival of English patriotism is yet more distinctly visible 
in the Sayings of JElfred and the legend of Hereward's struggle 
in the Fens of Ely, whose composition may probably be jDlaced in 
the reign of Henry the Second. 

We may see the tendency of English literature at the close of 
the iN'orman period in William of Malmesburj^, In himself, as in 
his work, he marks the fusion of the conquerors and the con- 
quered, for he was of both English and Norman parentage, and 
his sympathies were as divided as his blood. In the form and 
style of his writings he shows the influence of those classical stud- 
ies which w^ere now reviving throughout Christendom. Monk 
as he is, he discards the older ecclesiastical models and the an- 
nalistic form. Events are grouped together with no strict ref- 
erence to time, while the lively narrative flows rapidly and loose- 
ly along, with constant breaks of digression, over the general his- 
tory of Europe and the Church. It is in this change of historic 
spirit that William takes his place as first of the more statesman- 
like and philosophic school of historians who began soon to arise 
in direct connection with the Court, and among whom the author 
of the chronicle which commonly bears the name of " Benedict 
of Peterborough," with his continuator Roger of Plowden, are the 
most conspicuous. Both held judicial offices under Henry the 
Second, and it is to their position at Court that they owe the 
fullness and accuracy of their information as to afiairs at home 
and abroad, their copious supply of official documents, and the 
purely political temper with which they regard the conflict of 
Church and State in their time.^ The same freedom from ecclesi- 
astical bias, combined with remarkable critical ability, is found in 
the history of William, the Canon of Newborough. From the 
time of Henry the First, in fact, the English Court had become 
the centre of a distinctly secular literature. The treatise of 
Ranulf de Glanvill, the justiciar of Henry the Second, is the earli- 
est work on English law, as that of the royal treasurer, Richard 
Fitz-ISTeal, on the Exchequer, is the earliest on English govern- 
ment. Romance had long before taken root in the court of Henry 
the First, where, under the patronage of Queen Maud, the " Dreams 
of Arthur," so long cherished by the Celts of Brittany, which had 
traveled to Wales in the train of the exile Rhys ap Tewdor, took 
shape in the History of the Britons by Geofliy of Monmouth. 
Myth, legend, tradition, the classical pedantry of the day, the 
Welsh dreams of future triumph over the Saxon, the memories 
of the Crusades and of the world-wide dominion of Charles the 



III.] 



TEE GREAT CHARTER 



'IXT 



Great, were miDgled together by this claruig fabulist in a work 
whose popularity became at once immense. Alfred of Beverly 
transferred his inventions into the region of sober history, while 
two Norman trouveurs, Gaimar and Wace, translated them into 
French verse. So complete was the credence they obtained, that 
Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury was visited by Henry the Second, 
while the child of his son Geoifry and of Constance of Brittany 
bore the name of the Celtic hero. Out of Geoffry's creation grew 
little by little the poem of the Table Round. Brittany, which 
had mingled with the story of Arthur the older and more mysteri- 
ous legend of the Enchanter Merlin, lent that of Lancelot to the 
wandering minstreTs~of the day, who moulded it, as they wandered 
from hall to hall, into the familiar song of knighthood wrested 
from its loyalty by the love of woman. The stories of Tristram 
and Gawayne, at first as independent as that of Lancelot, were 
drawn with it into the whirlpool of Arthurian romance ; and 
when the Church, jealous of the popularity of the legends of 
chivalry, invented as a counteracting influence the poem of the 
Sacred Dish, the San Graal which held the blood of the Cross, 
invisible to all eyes but those of the pure in heart, the genius of a 
Court poet, Walter de Map, wove the rival legends together, sent 
Arthur and his knights wandering over sea and land in the quest 
of the San Graal, and crowned the work by the figure of Sir Gala- 
had, the type of ideal knighthood, without fear and without re- 
proach, 

Walter was one of two remarkable men who stand before us as 
the representatives of a sudden outburst of literary, social, and re- 
ligious criticism which followed the growth of romance and the 
appearance of a freer historical tone in the court of the two Hen- 
ries. Born on the Welsh 'border, a student at Paris, a favorite 
with the King, a royal chaplain, justiciary, and embassador, the 
genius of Walter de Map was as various as it was prolific. He is 
as much at his ease in sweeping together the chit-chat of the time 
in his " Courtly Trifles," as in creating the character of Sir Gala- 
had. But he only rose to his fullest strength Avhen he turned 
from the fields of romance to that of Church reform, and embodied 
the ecclesiastical abuses of his day in the figure of his " Bishop 
Goliath." The whole spirit of Henry and his Court in their strug- 
gle with Beket is reflected and illustrated in the apocalypse and 
confession of this imaginary prelate. Picture after picture strips 
the veil from the corruption of the mediaeval Church, its indolence, 
its thirst for gain, its secret immorality. The whole body of the 
clergyvibaai Pope to hedge-priest, is painted as busy in the chase 
for gain ; what escapes the bishop is snapped up by the archdea- 
con, what escapes the archdeacon is nosed and hunted down by 
the dean, while a host of minor officials prowl hungrily around 
these greater marauders. Out of the crowd of figures which fills 
the canvas of the satirist, pluralist vicars, abbots " purple as their 
wines," monks feeding and chattering together like parrots in the 
refectory, rises the Philistine Bishop, light of purpose, void of con- 
science, lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, the Goliath who 

10 



Sec. I. 
English 

LlTEKATCEK 

under the 

noeman and 

Angevin 

Kings. 



Walter cJe 
Map. 



146 



BI8T0BY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Skc. I. 
ENdLisn 

LlTEKATUKE 
tTNDEB THK 

Norman and 

Angevin 

Kings. 



Gerald, tie 
liarri. 



Eevival of 

tlie 

Knglisli 

tongue. 



sums up the enormities of all, and against whose forehead this 
new David slings his sharp pebble of the brook. Powerless to 
hold the wine-cup, Goliath trolls out the famous drinking-song 
that a hundred translations have made familiar to us: 

"Die I must, but let me die drinking in an inn! 
Hold the wine-cup to my lips sparkling from the bin ! 
So, when angels flatter down to take me from my sin, 
'Ah, God have mercy (jn this sot,' the cherubs will begin!" 

The spirit of criticism which assailed in Walter the ecclesiastic- 
al system of the day, ventured in Gerald de Barri to attack its 
system of civil government. Gerald is the father of our popular 
literature, as he is the originator of the political and ecclesiastical 
pamphlet. Welsh blood (as his usual name of Giraldus Cambren- 
sis implies) mixed with ISTorman in his veins, and something of the 
restless Celtic fire runs alike through his writings and his life. A 
busy scholar at Paris, a reforming archdeacon in Wales, the wit- 
tiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome of bishops, Gerald 
became the gayest and most amusing of all the authors of his 
time. In his hands the stately Latin tongue took the vivacity 
and joicturesqueness of the jongleur's verse. Reared as he had 
been in classical studies, he threw pedantry contemptuously aside. 
" It is better to be dumb than not to be understood," is his char- 
acteristic apology for the novelty of his style : " new times require 
new fashions, and so I have thrown utterly aside the old and 'dry 
method of some authors, and aimed at adopting the fashion of 
speech which is actually in vogue to-day." His tract on the con- 
quest of Ireland and his account of Wales, which are in fact re- 
ports of two journeys undertaken in those countries with John 
and Archbishop Baldwin, illustrate his rapid faculty of careless 
observation, his audacity, and his good sense. They are just the 
sort of lively, dashing letters that we find in the correspondence 
of a modern journal. There is the same modern tone in his 
political pamphlets ; his profusion of jests, his fund of anecdote/ 
the aptness of his quotations, his natural shrewdness and critical 
acumen, the clearness and vivacity of his style, are backed by a 
fearlessness and impetuosity that made him a dangerous assailant 
even to such a ruler as Henry the Second. The invectives in 
which Gerald poured out his resentment against the Angevins 
are the cause of half the scandal about Henry and his sons which 
has found its way into history. His life was wasted in an inef- 
fectual struggle to secure the see of St. David's, but the pungent 
pen of the pamphleteer played its part in rousing the spirit of the 
nation to its struggle with the Crown. 

It is only, however, as the writings of Englishmen that Latin 
or French works like these can be claimed as part of English 
literature. Banished from Court by the Conquest, superseded in 
legal documents by Latin, the English tongue ceased to be liter- 
ary. The spoken tongue of the nation at large remained of course 
English as before; William himself had tried to learn it, that he 
might administer justice to his subjects ; but, like all popular dia- 
lects when freed from the control of a written literature, it tended 



III.] 



TRE GREAT CHABTEB. 



147 



to lose its grammatical complexities of gender and inflexion, while 
a few new words crept in from the language of the conquerors. 
One great monument indeed of English prose, the English Chron- 
icle itself, lingered on in the Abbey of Peterborough, but it died 
out amid the miseries of Stephen's reign, and as a written lan- 
gua2;e English was silent for more than half a century. Its re- 
vival coincides with the loss of Normandy and the return of John 
to his island realm. " There was a priest in the land whose name 
was Layamon ; he was son of Leoveuath : may the Lord be gra- 
cious to him ! He dwelt at Earnley, a noble church on the bank 
of Severn (good it seemed to him !), near Radstone, where he read 
books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest thought that 
he would tell the noble deeds of England, w^hat the men were 
named, and whence they came, who first had English land." 
Journeying far and wide over the land, the priest of Earnley 
found Bseda and Wace, the books too of S. Albin and S. Austin. 
"Layamon laid down these books and turned the leaves; he be- 
held them lovingly : may the Lord be merciful to him ! Pen he 
took with fingers and wrote a book-skin, and the true word set 
together and compressed the three books into one." Layamon's 
church is now Areley, near Bewdley, in Worcestershire ; his poem 
was in fact an amplified " Brut," with insertions from Bffida. His- 
torically it is worthless, but as a monument of our language it is 
beyond all price. After a sleep of half a century English woke 
up unchanged. In more than thirty thousand lines less than fifty 
ISTorman words are to be found. Even the old poetic tradition 
remains the same ; the alliterative metre of the earlier verse is 
only slightly aifected by rhyme, the similes are the few natural 
similes of CiTedraon, the battles are painted with the same rough, 
simple joy. It is by no mere accident that the English tongue 
thus wakes again into written life on the eve of the great struggle 
between the nation and its King. The artificial forms imposed 
by the Conquest were falling away from the people as from its 
literature, and a new England, quickened by the Celtic vivacity 
of De Map and the Norman daring of Gerald, stood forth to its 
conflict with John. 



Section O.— .Tolm. 1204—1215. 

[Authorities. — Our chief source of infonnation is the "Chronicle of Eoger of 
Wendover," the first of the S. Alban's annalists, whose woi'k was subsequently 
revised and continued in a more patriotic tone by another monk of the same abbey, 
Matthew Paris. The Annals of Waverley, Dunstable, and Burton are all important 
for the period. The great series of the Eoyal Rolls, patent and other, begin now 
to be of the highest value. The French authorities as before. For Langton, see 
Hook's biography in the ' ' Lives of the Archbishops. " The best modern account 
of this reign is in Mr. Pearson's " History of England," vol. ii.] 



"Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of 
John." The terrible verdict of the King's contemporaries has 
passed into the sober judgment of history. Externally John pos- 



HISTOBY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



sessed all the quickness, the vivacity, the cleverness, the good- 
humor, the social charm which distinguished his house. He was 
fond of books and learned men, he was the friend of Gerald as he 
was the student of Pliny. He had a strange gift of attracting 
friends and of winning the love of women. But in his inner soul 
John was the worst outcome of the Angevins. He united into 
one mass of wickedness their insolence, their selfishness, their un- 
bridled lust, their cruelty and tyranny, their shamelessness, their 
superstition, their cynical indifierence to honor or truth. In mere 
boyhood he had torn with brutak levity the beards of the Irish. 
chieftains wlio came to own him as their lord. His ingratitude 
and perfidy had brought down his father's hairs with sorrow to 
the grave. To his brother he had been the worst of traitors. All 
Christendom believed him to be the murderer of his nephew, Ar- 
thur of Brittany. He had abandoned one wife and was faithless 
to another. His punishments were refinements of cruelty, the 
starvation of children, the crushing old men under copes of lead. 
His court was a brothel, where no woman was safe from the royal 
lust, and where his cynicism loved to publish the news of his vic- 
tim's shame. He was as craven in his superstition as he was dar- 
ing in his impiety. He scoflTed at priests and turned his back on 
the mass, even amid the solemnities of his coronation, but he never 
stirred on a journey without hanging relics around his neck. But 
with the supreme wickedness of his race he inherited its profound 
ability. His plan for the relief of Chateau Gaillard, the rapid 
march by which he shattered Arthur's hopes at Mirabeau, showed 
an inborn genius for war. In the rapidity and breadth of his 
political combinations he far surpassed the statesmen of his time. 
Throughout his reign we see him quick to discern the difiiculties 
of his position, and inexhaustible in the resources with which he 
met them. The overthrow of his continental power only spurred 
him to the formation of a great league which all but brought 
Philip to the ground ; and the sudden revolt of all England was 
parried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy. The closer 
study of John's history clears away the charges of sloth and in- 
capacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. 
The awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that it was no weak 
and indolent voluptuary, but the ablest and most ruthless of the 
Angevins, who lost ISTorraandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and 
perished in a struggle of despair against English freedom. 

The whole energies of the King were bent on the recovery of 
his lost dominions on the Continent. He impatiently collected 
money and men for the support of the adherents of the house of 
Anjou, who Avere still struggling against the arms of France in 
Poitou and Guienne, and had assembled an army at Portsmouth 
in the summer of 1205, when his project was suddenly thwarted 
by the resolute opposition of the Primate and the Earl Mareschal. 
So completely had both the baronage and the Church been hum- 
bled by his father, that the attitude of their representatives indi- 
cated the new" spirit of national freedom which was rising around 
the King. John at once braced himself to the struggle. The 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHAETEE. 



149 



death of Hubert Walter, a few clays after this successful protest, 
enabled him, as it seemed, to neutralize the opposition of the 
Church by placing; a creature of his own at its head. John de 
Grey, Bishop of Norwich, was elected by the monks of Canter- 
bury at his bidding and enthroned as Primate. In a previous 
though informal gathering, however, the convent had- already 
chosen its sub-prior, Reginald, as Archbishop, and the rival claim- 
ants hastened to appeal to Rome, but the result of their appeal 
was a startling one both for- themselves and for the King. Inno- 
cent the Third, who now occupied the Papal throne, had pushed 
its claims of supremacy over Christendom further than any of 
liis predecessors : resolved to free the Church of England from 
the royal tyranny, he quashed both the contested elections, and 
commanded the monks who appeared before him to elect in his 
presence Stephen Langton to the archiepiscopal see. Personally, 
a better choice could not have been made, for Stephen was a man 
who by sheer weight of learning and holiness of life had risen to 
the dignity of Cardinal, and whose after career placed him in 
the front rank of English patriots. But in itself the step was a 
violent usurpation of the rights both of the Church and of the 
Crown. The King at once met it with defiance, and replied to 
the Papal threats of interdict if Langton were any longer ex- 
cluded from his see, by a counter threat that the interdict should 
be followed by the banishment of the clergy and the mutilation 
of every Italian he could seize in the realm. Innocent, however, 
was not a man to draw back from his purpose, and the interdict 
fell at last upon the land. All worship save that of a few priv- 
ileged orders, all administration of the Sacrament save that of 
private baptism, ceased over the length and breadth of the coun- 
try ; the church-bells were silent, the dead lay unburied on the 
ground. The King replied by confiscating the lands of the 
clergy who observed the interdict, by subjecting them, in spite 
of their privileges, to the royal courts, and Often by leaving out- 
rages on them unpunished. "Let him go," said John, when a 
Welshman was brought before him for the murder of a priest; 
"he has killed my enemy." Two years passed before the Pope 
proceeded to the further sentence of excommunication. John 
was now formally cut off from the pale of the Church ; but the 
new sentence was met with the same defiance as the old. Five 
of the bishops had fled over sea, and secret disaffection was 
spreading widely, but there was no public avoidance of the ex- 
communicated King. An Archdeacon of Norwich, who with- 
drew from his service, was crushed to death under a cope of lead, 
and the hint was sufficient to prevent either prelate or noble 
from following his example. Only one weapon now remained in 
Innocent's hands. An excommunicate king had ceased to be a 
Christian, or to have claims on the obedience of Christian sub- 
jects, -^s spiritual heads of Christendom, the Popes had ere now 
asserted their right to remove such a ruler from his throne, and 
to give it to a worthier than he. It was this right which Inno- 
cent tassertediinrrthe deposition of John. He proclaimed a cru- 



150 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



sade against him, and committed the execution of his sentence to 
Philip of France. John met it with the same scorn as before. 
His insolent disdain suffered the Roman deacon, Pandulf, to pro- 
claim his deposition to his very face at Northampton. An enor- 
mous army gathered at his call on Barham Down, and the En- 
glish fleet dispelled all danger of invasion on the part of Philip's 
forces now assembled on the opposite coast by crossing the Chan- 
nel, capturing some ships, and burning Dieppe. 

At the very moment of apparent triumph John suddenly gave 
way. It was the revelation of a danger at home which shook 
him out of his contemptuous inaction. From the first he had 
guarded jealously against any revolt of the baronage during his 
struggle with the Church; he had demanded the surrender of 
their children as hostages for their loyalty; he had crushed a 
rising of the Irish nobles in the midst of the interdict, and foiled 
by rapid marches the efforts at rebellion which Innocent had 
stirred up in Scotland and Wales. Barbarous cruelties cele- 
brated his triumph ; he drove De Eraose, one of the most power- 
ful of the Lords Marchers, to die in exile, while his wife and 
grandchildren were believed to have been starved to death in 
the royal prisons. On the nobles who still clung panic-stricken 
to the court of the excommunicate king, John heaped outrages 
worse than death. Illegal exactions, the seizure of their castles, 
the preference shown to foreigners, were small jDrovocations com- 
pared with his attacks on the honor of their wives and daughters. 
Powerless to resist openly, the baronage plunged almost to a man 
into secret conspiracies : many promised aid to Philip on his 
landing, while the King of Scots, with Llewellyn of Wales, were 
busy in corresponding with the Pope. It was with the proofs of 
this universal disaffection in his hands that Pandulf summoned 
John to submit; but the ambition of the King seconded his fears. 
Vile as he Avas, he possessed in the highest degree the ability of 
his race, and in the wide combination he had long been planning 
against Philip he showed himself superioi', as a diplomatist, to 
Henry himself The barons of Poitou were already sworn to aid 
him in the South. He had purchased the alliance of the Count 
of Flanders in the North. His nephew Otho, the Papal claimant 
of the Empire, had engaged to bring the knighthood of Germany 
to his aid. But for the success of this vast combination a recon- 
ciliation with the Pope was indispensable, for none of his allies, 
and least of all Otho, could fight side by side wdth an excom- 
municate king. Once resolved on, his submission was effected 
with a shameless cynicism. Not only did John promise to re- 
ceive Langton, and to compensate the clergy for their losses, not 
only did he grovel at the feet of the exiled bishops on their re- 
turn, but, amid the wonder and disgust of his Court, he solemnly 
resigned both crown and realms into the hands of the legate, and 
received them back again to be held by fealty and homage as a 
vassal of the Pope. 

England thrilled at the news with a sense of national shame 
such as she had never felt before. "He has become the Pope's 



III.] 



TSE GREAT CHARTER. 



151 



man," the whole country mui'inured ; "he has forfeited the very 
name of King ; from a free man he has degraded himself into a 
serf" But as a political measure the success of John's submis- 
sion was complete. The French army at once broke up in impo- 
tent rage, but on its advance toward Flanders five hundred En- 
glish ships under the Earl of Salisbury fell upon the fleet which 
accompanied it along the coast and utterly destroyed it. The 
great league which John had so long matured at last disclosed 
itself "The King himself landed in Poitou, rallied its barons 
around him, crossed the Loire in triumph, and recaptured Angers, 
the home of his race. At the same time Otho, reinforcing his 
German army by the knighthood of Flanders and Boulogne, as 
well as by a body of English mercenaries, invaded France from 
the north. For the moment Philip seemed lost, and yet on the 
fortunes of Philip hung the fortunes of English freedom. But in 
this crisis of her fate France was true to herself and her King ; 
the townsmen marched from every borough to Philip's rescue, 
priests led their flocks to battle with the sacred banners flying at 
their head. The two armies met near the bridge of Bouvines, 
between Lille and Tournay, and from the first the day went 
against the invaders. The Flemish were the first to fly, then the 
German centre was overwhelmed by the numbers of the French, 
last of all the English on the right were broken by the fierce on- 
set of the Bishop of Beauvais, who charged mace in hand, and 
struck the Earl of Salisbury to the ground. The news of this 
complete overthrow reached John in the midst of his triumphs 
in the South, and scattered his hopes to the winds. He was at 
once deserted by the Poitevin noblesse, and a precipitate retreat 
alone enabled him to return, bafiied and humiliated, to his island 
kingdom. 

It is to the victory of Bouvines that England owes her Great 
Charter. From the hour of his submission to the Papacy, John's 
vengeance on the barons had only been delayed till he should re- 
turn a conqueror from the fields of France. A sense of their 
danger nerved the nobles to resistance; they refused to follow 
the King on his foreign campaign till the excommunication were 
removed, and when it was removed they still refused, on the plea 
that they were not bound to serve in wars without the' realm. 
Furious as he was at this new attitude of resistance, the time had 
not yet come for vengeance, and John sailed for Poitou with the 
dream of a great victory which should lay Philip and the barons 
alike at his feet. He returned from his defeat to find the nobles 
no longer banded together in secret conspiracies, but openly 
united in a definite claim of liberty and law. The author of this 
great change was the new Archbishop whom Lmocent had set on 
the throne of Canterbury. From the moment of his landing in 
England, Stephen Langton had assumed the constitutional posi- 
tion of the Primate as champion of the old English customs and 
law against the personal despotism of the kings. As Anselm 
had withstood William the Red, as Theobald had rescued En- 
gland from the lawlessness of Stephen, so Langton prepared to 



152 



HISTORY OF THE EXGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Avitbstand and rescue Jiis country from the tyranny of John. At 
his first meeting with the King he called on him to swear to the 
observance of the laws of the Confessor, a phrase in which the 
whole of the national liberties were summed up. Churchman as 
he was, he protested against the royal homage to the Pope; and 
when John threatened vengeance on the barons for their refusal to 
sail with him to Poitou, Langton menaced him with excommunica- 
tion if he assailed his subjects by any but due process of law. Far, 
however, from being satisfied with resistance such as this to iso- 
lated acts of tyranny, it was the Archbishop's aim to restore on a 
formal basis the older freedom of the realm. In a private meeting 
of the barons at St. Paul's he produced the Charter of Henry the 
First, and the enthusiasm with which it was welcomed showed 
the sagacity with which the Primate had chosen his ground for 
the coming struggle. All hope, however, hung on the fortunes 
of the French campaign ; it was the victory at Bouvines that 
broke the spell of terror, and within a few days of the King's 
landing the barons again met at St. Edmundsbury, and swore on 
the high altar to demand from him, if needful by force of arms, 
the observance of Henry's Charter and of the Confessor's Law. 
At Christmas they presented themselves in arras before the King 
and preferred their claim. The few months that followed show- 
ed John that he stood alone in the land; nobles and Churchmen 
were alike arrayed against him, and the commissioners whom ,he 
sent to plead his cause at the County Courts brought back the 
news that no man would help him against the Charter. At 
Easter the barons again gathered in arms at Brackley, and re- 
newed their claim. "Why do they not ask for my kingdom?" 
cried John in a burst of passion ; but the whole country rose as 
one man at his refusal. London threw open her gates to the 
army of the barons, now organized under Robert Fitz-Walter, 
"the marshal of the army of God and holy Church." The ex- 
ample of the capital was at once followed by Exeter and Lincoln ; 
promises of aid came from Scotland and Wales ; the northern 
nobles marched hastily to join their comrades in London. With 
seven horsemen in his train John found himself face to face with 
a nation in arms. He had summoned mercenaries and appealed 
to his liege lord, the Pope ; but summons and appeal Avere alike 
too late. • ISTursing wrath in his heart the tyrant bowed to neces- 
sity, and summoned the barons to a conference at Runnymede. 

Section III.— Tlie Great Charter. 1215-1217. 

{Authorities. — The text of the Charter is given by Professor Stubbs, with valuable 
comments, in his "Documents Illustrated," etc. Mr. Pearson gives a useful analy- 
sis of it.] 

An island in the Thames between Staines and Windsor had been 
chosen as the place of conference: the King encamped on one bank, 
while the barons covered the marshy flat, still known by the name 
of Runnymede, on the other. Their delegates met in the island be- 



IILj 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



153 



tween them, but the Begotiations were a mere cloak to cover John's 
purpose of unconditional submission. The Great Charter was dis- 
cussed, agreed to, and signed in a single day. 

One copy of it still remains in the British Museum, injured by 
age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the brown, 
shriveled parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence 
on the earliest monument of English freedom which we can see 
with our own eyes and touch with our own hands, the great Chai^- 
ter to which from age to age patriots have looked back as the ba- 
sis of English liberty. But in itself the Charter was no novelty, 
nor did it claim to establish any new constitutional principles. 
The Charter of Henry the First formed the basis of the whole, 
and the additions to it are for the most part formal recognitions 
of the judicial and administrative changes introduced by Henry 
the Second. But the vague expressions of the older charters were 
now exchanged for precise and elaborate provisions. The bonds 
of unwritten custom which the older grants did little more than 
recognize had proved too weak to hold the Angevins; and the 
baronage now threw them aside for the I'estraints of written law. 
It is in this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from 
the age of traditional rights, preserved in the nation's memory 
and officially declared by the Primate, to the age of written legis- 
lation, of Parliaments and Statutes, which was soon to come. The 
Church had shown its power of self-defense in the struggle over 
the interdict, and the clause which recognized its rights alone re- 
tained the older and general form. But all vagueness ceases when 
the Charter passes on to deal with the rights of Englishmen at 
large, their right to justice, to security of person and property, 
to good government. "No freeman," ran the memorable article 
that lies at the base of our whole judicial system, "shall be seized 
or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way brought 
to ruin : we Avill not go against any man nor send against him, 
save by legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." 
"To no man will we sell," runs another, "or deny, or delay, right 
or justice." The great reforms of the jDast reigns were now for- 
mally recognized ; judges of assize were to hold their circuits four 
times in the year, and the Court of Common Pleas was f.o longer 
to follow the King in his wanderings over the realm, but to sit in 
a fixed place. But the denial of justice under John was a small 
danger compared with the lawless exactions both of himself and 
his predecessor. Richard had increased the amount of the scu- 
tage which Henry II. had introduced, and applied it to raise funds 
for his ransom. He had restored the Danegeld, or land tax, so 
often abolished, under the new name of "carucage," had seized 
the wool of the Cistercians and the plate of the churches, and 
rated movables as well as land. John had again raised the rate 
of scutage, and imposed aids, fines, and ransoms at his pleasure 
Avithout counsel of the baronage. The Great Charter met this 
abuse by the provision on which our constitutional system rests. 
With the exception of the three customary feudal aids which still 
remained to the Crown, "no scutage or aid shall be imposed in our 



154 



HISTOET OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



realm save by the Common Council of the realm;" and to this 
Great Council it was jDrovided that prelates and the greater bar- 
ons should be summoned by special writ, and all tenants in chief 
through the sheriffs and bailiffs, at least forty days before. A 
number of irregular exactions were abolished or assessed at a fix- 
ed rate, the abuses of wardship were reformed, and widows pro- 
tected against the compulsory marriages to which they had been 
subjected to the profit of the Crown. 

The rights which the barons claimed for themselves they claim- 
ed for the nation at large. The boon of free and i;nbought justice 
was a boon for all, but a special provision protected the right of 
the poor. The forfeiture of the freeman on conviction of felony 
was never to include his tenement, or that of the merchant his 
wares, or that of the countryman his wain. The means of actual 
livelihood were to be left even to the worst. The under-tenants 
or farmers were protected against all lawless exactions of their 
lords in precisely the same terms as these were protected against 
the lawless exactions of the Crown. The towns were secured in 
the enjoyment of their municipal privileges, their freedom from 
arbitrary taxation, their rights of justice, of common deliberation, 
of regulation of trade. "Let the city of London have all its old 
liberties and its free customs, as well by land as by water. Be- 
sides this, we will and grant that all other cities, and boroughs, 
and towns, and ports, have all their liberties and free customs." 
The influence of the trading class is seen in two other enactments, 
by which freedom of journeying and trade was secured to foreign 
merchants, and a uniformity of weights and measures was or- 
dered to be enforced throughout the realm. There remained only 
one question, and that the most difiicult of all: the question how 
to secure this order which the Cliarter had established in the act- 
ual government of the realm. The immediate abuses were easily 
swept away, the hostages restored to their homes, the foreigners 
banished from the country. But it was less easy to provide means 
for the control of a King whom no man could trust, and a council 
of twenty-four barons was chosen from the general body of their 
order to enforce on John the observance of the Charter, with the 
right of 'declaring war on the King should its provisions be in- 
fringed. Finally, the Charter was published throughout the whole 
country, and sworn to at every hundred-mote and town-mote by 
order from the King. 

"They have given me four-and-twenty over-kings," cried John 
in a burst of fury, flinging himself on the floor and gnawing sticks 
and straw in his impotent rage. But the rage soon passed into 
the subtle policy of which he was a master. Before daybreak 
he had ridden from "Windsor, and he lingered for montlis along 
the Southern shore, the Cinque Ports and the Isle of Wight, wait- 
ing for news of the aid he had solicited from Rome and from the 
Continent. It was not without definite purpose that he had be- 
come the vassal of Rome. "While Innocent was dreaming of a 
vast Christian Empire, with the Pope at its head, to enforce jus- 
tice and religion on his under-kings, John believed that the Papal 



III.] 



THE GREAT CRAETEB. 



155 



protection would enable him to rule as tyrannically as he would. 
The thunders of the Papacy were to be ever at hand for his pro- 
tection, as the armies of England are at hand to protect the vile- 
ness and oppression of a Turkish Sultan or a Nizam of Hyderabad. 
His envoys were already at Rome, and Innocent, wroth both at 
the revolt against his vassal and the disregard of his own position 
as over-lord, annulled the Great Charter and suspended Stephen 
Langton from the exercise of his office as Primate. Autumn 
brought a host of foreign soldiers from over- sea to the King's 
standard, and advancing against the disorganized forces of the 
barons, John starved Rochester into submission, and marched rav- 
aging through the midland counties to the North, while his mer- 
cenaries spread like locusts over the whole face of the land. From 
Berwick the King turned back triumphant to coop up his enemies 
in London, where fresh Papal excommunications fell on the barons 
and the city. But the burghers set Innocent at defiance. "The 
ordering of secular matters appertaineth not to the Pope," thej^ 
said, in words that seem like mutterings of the coming Lollard- 
ism; and at the advice of Simon Langton, the Archbishop's broth- 
er, bells swung out and mass was celebrated as before. With the 
undisciplined militia of the country and the towns, however, suc- 
cess was impossible against the trained forces of the King, and 
despair drove the barons to seek aid from France. Philip had 
long been waiting the opportunity for his revenge upon John, 
and his son Lewis at once accepted the crown in spite of Inno- 
cent's excommunications, and landed in Tbanet with a consider- 
able force. As the barons had foreseen, the French mercenaries 
who constituted John's host refused to fight against the French 
sovereign. The whole aspect of afiairs was suddenly reversed. 
Deserted by the bulk of his troops, the King was forced to fall 
rapidly back on the Welsh Marches, while his rival entered Lon- 
don and received the submission of the larger part of England. 
Only Dover, under Hubert de Burgh, held out obstinately against 
Lewis, and John, who by a series of rapid marches had succeeded 
in distracting the plans of the barons and relieving Lincoln, now 
turned southward to rescue the great fortress of the coast. In 
crossing the Wash, however, his army was surprised by the tide, 
and his baggage, with the royal treasures, washed away. 

The fever which seized the baflBled tyrant in the Abbey of 
Swineshead was inflamed by a gluttonous debauch, and John en- 
tered Newark only to die. His death changed the whole face of 
affaii's, for his son Henry was but a child ten years old, and the 
royal authority passed into the hands of one who was to stand 
high among English patriots — William, the Earl Mareschal. The 
coronation of the boy-king was at once followed by the solemn 
acceptance of the Great Charter, and the nobles soon sti'eamed 
away from the French camp; for national jealousy and suspicions 
of treason told heavily against Lewis, while the pity which was 
excited by the youth and heli^lessness of Henry was aided by a 
sense of injustice in burdening the child with the iniquity of his 
father. One bold stroke of the Earl Mareschal decided the strusr- 



156 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap 



gle. A joint array of Frenchmen and English barons, under the 
Count of Perche and Robert Fitz-Walter, were besieging Lincoln, 
when the Earl, suddenly gathering forces from the I'oyal castles, 
marched to its relief. Cooped up in the steep narrow streets, and 
attacked at once by the Earl and the garrison, the French fled in 
hopeless rout; the Count of Perche fell on the field; Robert Fitz- 
Walter was taken prisonei-. A more terrible defeat crushed the 
remaining hopes of Lewis. Large reinforcements set sail from 
France to his aid, under the escort of Eustace the Monk, a well- 
known freebooter of the Channel, but in the midst of their voyage 
a small English fleet, which had set sail from Dover under Hubert 
de Burgh, fell boldly on their rear. The fight admirably illus- 
trates the naval warfare of the time. From the decks of the En- 
glish vessels the bowmen of Philip d'Aubeny poured their arrows 
into the crowded masses on board the transports, others hurled 
quicklime into their enemies' faces, while the more active vessels 
crashed with their armed prows into the sides of the French ships. 
Tlie skill of the mariners of the Cinque Ports decided the day 
against the larger forces of their opponents, and the fleet of Eus- 
tace was utterly destroyed. Earl Mareschal now closed in upon 
London, but resistance was really at an end. By the treaty of 
Lambeth, LeAvis promised to withdraw from England on payment 
of a sum which he claimed as debt ; his adherents were restored 
to their possessions, the liberties of London and other towns con- 
firmed, and the prisoners on either side restored to liberty. The 
nobla spirit of Earl Mareschal was shown in the wisdom and mod- 
eration of the terms of submission, and the expulsion of the stran- 
ger left England beneath the rule of a statesman whose love for 
the Charter was as great as its own. 



Section IV.— Tlie Universities. 

[^Authorities. — Huber, in his "English Universities," has given the outlines of 
the subject ; its details may be found in Anthony Wood's "History of the Univer- 
sity of Oxford." I have borrowed much from two papers of my own in " Macmil- 
lan's Magazine" on "The Early History of Oxford." For Bacon, see his "Opera 
Inedita," in the Eolls Series, with Mr. Brewer's admirable introduction, and Dr. 
Whewell's estimate of him in his History of the Inductive Sciences.] 



From the turmoil of civil politics we turn to the more silent 
but hardly less important revolution from which we may date 
our national education. It is in the reign of Henry the Third 
that the English universities begin to exercise a definite influence 
on the intellectual life of Englishmen. Of the early history of 
Cambridge we know little or nothing, but enough remains to en- 
able us to trace the early steps by which Oxford attained to its 
intellectual eminence. The establishment of the great schools 
which bore the name of Universities was every where throughout 
Europe the special mark of the new impulse that Christendom had 
gained from the Crusades. A new fervor of study sprang up in 
the West from its contact with the more civilized East. Travel- 



III.] 



TRE GREAT CHABTEB. 



157 



ers like Adelard of Batli brought back the first rudiments of 
physical and mathematical science from the schools of Cordova 
or Bagdad. The earliest classical revival restored Casar and 
Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp on the 
pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of writers like 
William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury. The scholastic 
philosophy sprung up in the schools of Paris. The Roman law 
was revived by the imperialist doctors of Bologna. The long 
mental inactivity of feudal Europe was broken up like ice before 
a summer's sun. Wandering teachers like Lanfrauc or Auselm 
crossed sea and land to spread the new power of knowledge. The 
same spirit of restlessness, of inquiry, of impatience with the older 
traditions of mankind, either local or intellectual, that had hurried 
half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with 
thousands of young scholars hurrying to the chosen seats whei-e 
teachers were gathered together. A new power had sprung up 
in the midst of a world as yet under the rule of sheer brute force. 
Poor as they were, sometimes even of a servile race, the wander- 
ing scholars who lectui'ed in every cloister were hailed as " mas- 
ters" by the crowds at their feet. Abelard was a foe worthy of 
the menaces of councils, of the thunders of the Church. The 
teaching of a single Lombard was of note enough in England to 
draw down the prohibition of a king. When Vacarius, probably 
a guest in the court of Archbishop Theobald, where Beket and 
Jolm of Salisbury were already busy with the study of the Canon 
Law, opened lectures on it at Oxford, he was at once silenced by 
Stephen, then at w^ar with the Church, and jealous of the power 
which the wreck of tlie royal authority and the anarchy of his 
rule had already thrown into its hands. 

At the time of the arrival of Vacarius, Oxford stood in the first 
rank among English towns. Its town church of St. Martin rose 
from the midst of a huddled group of houses, girt in with massive 
walls, that lay along the dry upper ground of a low peninsula 
between the streams of Cherwell and the upper Thames. The 
ground fell gently on either side, eastward and westward, to these 
rivers, while on the south a sharper descent led down across 
swampy meadows to the city bridge. Around lay a wild forest 
country, the moors of Cowley and Bullingdon fringing the course 
of Thames, the great woods of Shotover and Bagley closing the 
horizon to the south and east. Though the two huge towers of 
its Norman castle marked the strategic importance of Oxford as 
commanding the great river valley along which the commerce of 
Southern England mainly flowed, its walls formed, perhaps, the 
least element in its military strength, for on every side but the 
north the town was guarded by the swampy meadows along Cher- 
well, or by the intricate network of streams into which Isis breaks 
among the meadows of Osney. From the midst of these meadows 
rose a mitred abbey of Benedictines, which, with the older priory 
of St.Frideswide, gave the town some ecclesiastical dignity. The 
residence of the Earl within its castle, the frequent visits of En- 
glish kings to a palace within its walls, the presence again and^ 



Tub Univf.1 

SITIES. 



158 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



again of important Parliaments, marked its political weight with- 
in the realm. The settlement of one of the wealthiest among the 
English Jewries in the very heart of the town indicated, while it 
promoted, the activity of its trade. Its burghers were proud of a 
liberty equal to that of London, while the close and peculiar alli- 
ance of the capital promised the city a part almost equal to its 
own in the history of England. No city better illustrates the 
transformation of the land in the hands of its ISTorman masters, 
the sudden outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion of 
commerce and accumulation of wealth, which followed the Con- 
quest. To the west of the town rose one of the stateliest of En- 
glish castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less stately 
abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the last of the Norman 
kings raised his palace of Beaumont. The canons of St. Frideswide 
reared the church which still exists as the diocesan cathedral, while 
the piety of the Norman Castellans rebuilt almost all the parish 
churches of the city, and founded within their new castle walls 
the church of the Canons of St. George. We know nothing of the 
causes which drew students and teachers within the walls of Ox- 
ford. It is possible that here as elsewhere the new teacher had 
quickened older educational foundations, and that the cloisters of 
Osney and St. Frideswide already possessed schools which burst 
into a larger life under the impulse ofVacarius. As yet, howev- 
er, the fortunes of the University were obscured by the glories of 
Paris. English scholars gathered in thousands around the chairs 
of William of Champeaux or Abelard. The English took their 
place as one of the " nations" of the French University. John 
of Salisbury became famous as one of the Parisian teachers. Beket 
wandered to Paris from his school at Merton. But through the 
peaceful reign of Henry the Second, Oxford was quietly increasing 
in numbers and repute. Forty years after the visit ofVacarius, 
its educational position was fully established. When Gerald of 
Wales read his amusing Topography of Ireland to its students, 
the most learned and famous of the English clergy were, he tells 
us, to be found within its walls. At the opening of the thirteenth 
century Oxford was without a rival in its own country, while in 
European celebrity it took rank with the greatest schools of the 
Western world. But to realize this Oxford of the past we must 
dismiss from our minds all recollections of the Oxford of the pres- 
ent. In the outer aspect of the new University there was nothing 
of the pomp that overawes the freshman as he first paces the 
"High," or looks down from the gallery of St. Mary's. In the 
stead of long fronts of venerable colleges, of stately walks be- 
neath immemorial elms, history plunges us into the mean and 
filthy lanes of a mediaeval town. Thousands of boys, huddled in 
bai'e lodging-houses, clustering around teachers as poor as them- 
selves in church-poi'ch and house-porch — drinking, quarreling, dic- 
ing, begging at the corners of the streets — take the place of the 
brightly colored train of doctors and Heads. Mayor and Chan- 
cellor struggle in vain to enforce order or peace on this seething 
mass of turbulent life. The retainers who follow their young lords 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHABTEB. 



159 



to the University fight out the feuds of their houses in the sti'eets. 
Scholars from Kent and scholars from Scotland wage the bitter 
struggle of North and South. At night-fall roysterer and reveler 
roam with torches through the narrow lanes, defying bailiffs, and 
cutting down burghers at their doors, Now a mob of clerks 
plunges into the Jewry, and wipes off the memory of bills and 
bonds by sacking a Hebrew house or two. Now a tavern i-ow 
between scholar and townsman widens into a general broil, and 
the academical bell of St. Mary's vies with the town bell of St. Mar- 
tin's in clanging to arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical contro- 
versy or political strife is preluded by some fierce outbreak in this 
tui'bulent, surging mob. When England growls at the exactions 
of the Papacy, the students besiege a legate in the abbot's house 
at Osney. A murderous town-and-gown row precedes the open- 
ing of the Barons' War. "When Oxford draws knife," runs the 
old rhyme, "England's soon at strife." 

But the turbulence and stir is a stir and turbulence of life. A 
keen thirst for knowledge, a passionate poetry of devotion, gath- 
ered thousands around the poorest scholar, and welcomed the bare- 
foot friar. Edmund Rich — Archbishop of Canterbury and saint 
in later days — came, a boy of twelve years old, from the little 
lane at Abingdon that still bears his name. He found his school 
in an inn that belonged to the abbey of Eynsham, where his father 
had taken refuge from the world. His mother was a pious woman 
of his day, too poor to give her boy much outfit besides the hair 
shirt that he promised to wear every Wednesday ; but Edmund 
was no poorer than his neighbors. He plunged at once into the 
nobler life of the place, its ardor for knowledge, its mystical piety. 
" Secretly," perhaps at even-tide when the shadows were gather- 
ing in the church of St. Mary's, and the crowd of teachers and 
students had left its aisles, the iDoy stood before an image of the 
Virgin, and, placing a ring of gold upon its finger, took Mary for 
his bride. Years of study, bi'oken by the fever that raged among 
the crowded, noisome streets, brought the time for completing 
his education at Paris, and Edmund, hand in hand with a brother 
Robert of his, begged his way, as poor scholars were wont, to the 
great school of Western Christendom. Here a damsel, heedless 
of his tonsure, wooed him so pertinaciously that Edmund consent- 
ed at last to an assignation ; but when he appeared it was in com- 
pany of grave academical oflScials, who, as the maiden declared in 
the hour of penitence which followed, " straightway whipped the 
offending Eve out of her." Still true to his Virgin bridal, Edmund, 
on his return from Paris, became the most popular of Oxford teach- 
ers. It is to him that Oxford owes her first introduction to the 
Logic of Aristotle. We see him in the little room which he hired, 
with the Virgin's chapel hard bjf, his gray gown reaching to his 
feet, ascetic in his devotion, falling asleep in lecture-time after a 
sleepless night of prayer, Avith a grace and cheerfulness of manner 
which told of his French training, and a chivalrous love of knowl- 
edge that let his pupils pay what they Avould. "Ashes to ashes, 
dust to dust," tlie young tutor would say, a touch of scholarly 



160 



SIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



pride periiaps mingling with his contempt of Avoridly things, as 
he threw down the fee on the dusty window-ledge, where a thiev- 
ish student would sometimes run olF with it. But even knowledge 
brought its troubles ; the Old Testament, Avliich with a copy of 
the Decretals long formed his sole library, frowned down upon 
a love of secular learning from which Edmund found it hard to 
wean himself. At last, in some hour of dream, the form of his 
dead mother floated into the room where the teacher stood among 
his mathematical diagrams, " What are these ?" she seemed to 
say; and seizing Edmund's right hand, she drew on the palm three 
circles interlaced, each of which bore the name of one of the Per- 
sons of the Christian Trinity. "Be these," she cried, as her figure 
faded away, " thy diagrams henceforth, my son." 

The story admirably illustrates the real character of the new 
training, and the latent opposition between the spirit of the Uni- 
versities and the spirit of the Church. The feudal and ecclesias- 
tical order of the old mediseval world were both alike threatened 
by the poAver that had so strangely sprung up in the midst of 
tliem. Feudalism rested on local isolation, on the severance of 
kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the distinc- 
tion of blood and race, on the supremacy of material or brute 
force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of place and so- 
cial position. The University, on the other hand, was a protest 
against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school Was 
European, and not local. Not merely every province of France, 
but every people of Christendom, had its place among the " na- 
tions" of Paris or Padua. A common language, the Latin tongue, 
superseded within academical bounds the warring tongues of Eu- 
rope. A common intellectual kinship and rivalry took the place 
of the petty strifes which parted jDrovince from province or realm 
from realm. What the Church and Empire had both aimed at 
and both failed in, the knitting of Christian nations together into 
a vast commonwealth, the Universities for a time actually did.^ 
Dante felt himself as little a stranger in the "Latin" quarter 
around Mont St. Genevieve as under the arches of Bologna. 
Wandering Oxford scholars carried the writings of Wielif to the 
libraries of Prague, In England the work of provincial fusion 
was less difficult or important than elsewhere, but even in En- 
gland work had to be done. The feuds of Northerner and South- 
erner which so long disturbed the discipline of Oxford witnessed 
at any rate to the fact that Northerner and Southerner had at 
last been brought face to face in its streets. And here as else- 
where the spirit of natural isolation was held in check by the 
larger comprehensiveness of the University. After the dissen- 
sions that threatened the prosperity of Paris in the thirteenth 
centurj', Norman and Gascon mingled with Englishmen in Oxford 
lecture-halls. At a far later time the rebellion of Owen Glyn- 
dwyr found hundreds of Welsh scholars gathered around its 
teachers. And within this strangely mingled mass, society and 
government rested on a purely democratic basis. The son of the 
noble stood on precisely the same footing with the poorest men- 



III.] 



THE GREAT CRABTEB. 



161 



dicant among Oxford scholars. Wealth, physical strength, skill 
in arms, pride of ancestry and blood, the very basis on which 
feudal society rested, went for nothing in Oxford lecture-rooms. 
The University was a state absolutely self-governed, and whose 
citizens were admitted by a purely intellectual franchise. Knowl- 
edge made the " master." To know more than one's fellows was 
a man's sole claim to be a " ruler" in the schools ; and within this 
intellectual aristocracy all were equal. The free commonwealth 
of the masters gathered in the aisles of St. Mary's as the free 
commonwealth of Florence gathered in Santa Maria Novella. 
All had an equal right to counsel, all had an equal vote in the 
final decision. Treasury and library were at the comj)lete dis- 
posal of the body of masters. It was their voice that named ev- 
ery officer, that proposed and sanctioned every statute. Even 
the Chancellor, their head, who had at first been an officer of the 
Bishop, became an elected officer of their own. 

If the democratic spirit of the Universities threatened feudal- 
ism, their spirit of intellectual inquiry threatened the Church. 
To all outer seeming they were purely ecclesiastical bodies. The 
wide extension which mediteval usage gave to the word " orders" 
gathered the whole educated world within the pale of the clergy. 
Whatever might be their age or proficiency, scholar and teacher 
were alike clerks, free from lay I'esponsibilities or the control of 
civil tribunals, and amenable only to the rule of the Bishop and 
the sentence of his spiritual courts. This ecclesiastical character 
of the University appeared in that of its head. The Chancellor, 
as we have seen, was at first no officer of the University, but of 
the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow he had sprung into 
life. He was simply the local officer of the Bishop of Lincoln, 
within Avhose immense diocese the University was then situated. 
But this identification in outer form with the Church only ren- 
dered more conspicuous the difference of its spirit. The sudden 
expansion of the field of education diminished the importance of 
those purely ecclesiastical and theological studies which had hith- 
erto absorbed the whole intellectual energies of mankind. The 
revival of classical literature, the rediscovery as it were of an 
older and a greater world, the contact with a larger, freer life, 
whether in mind, in society, or in politics, introduced a spirit of 
skepticism, of doubt, of denial into the realms of unquestioning- 
belief. Abelard claimed for reason the supremacy over faith. 
The Florentine poets discussed with a smile the immortality of 
the soul. Even to Dante, while he censures these, Virgil is as 
sacred as Jeremiah. The imperial ruler in whom the new culture 
took its most notable form, Frederick the Second, the " World's 
Wonder" of his time, was regarded by half Europe as no better 
than an infidel. The faint revival of physical science, so long 
crushed as magic by the dominant ecclesiasticism, brought Chris- 
tians into perilous contact Avith the Moslem and the Jew. The 
books of the Rabbis were no longer a mere accursed thing to 
Roger Bacon. The scholars of Cordova were no mere Paynim 
swine to Adelard of Bath. How slowly and against what ob- 

11 



Seo. IV. 



The Unitee- 

8ITIES. 



Tlie Uni- 
versities 
and the 
ChurcU. 



162 



EISTOEY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



stacles science won its way we know from tlie witness of Roger 
Bacon. " Slowly," he tells us, " has any portion of the philosophy 
of Aristotle come into use among the Latins. His Natural Phi- 
losophy and his Metaphj^sics, with the Commentaries of Averroes 
and others, Avere translated in my time, and interdicted at Paris 
up to the year a.d. 1237, because of their assertion of the eter- 
nity of the world and of time, and because of the book of the divv 
inations by dreams (which is the third book, De Somniis et Vi- 
giliis), and because of many passages erroneously translated. 
Even his logic was slowly received and lectured on. For St. Ed- 
mund, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was tlie first in my time 
who read the Elements at Oxford. And I have seen Master 
Hugo, who first read the book of Posterior Analytics, and I have 
seen his writing. So there were but few, considering the multi- 
tude of the Latins, who were of any account in the philosophy of 
Aristotle ; nay, very few indeed, and scarcely any up to this year 
of grace 1292.'" 

We shall see in a later page how fiercely the Church fought 
against this tide of opposition, and how it won back the alle- 
giance of the Universities through the begging friars. But it was 
in the ranks of the friars themselves that the intellectual prog- 
ress of the Universities found its highest representative. The 
life of Roger Bacon almost covers the thirteenth century; he was 
the child of Royalist parents, who had been driven into exile hnd 
reduced to poverty by the civil wars. From Oxford, where he 
studied under Edmund of Abingdon, to whom he owed his intro- 
duction to the works of Aristotle, he ])assed to the University of 
Paris, where his Avhole heritage was spent in costly studies and 
experiments. "From my youth up," he writes, "I have labored 
at the sciences and tongues. I have sought the friendship of all 
men among the Latins who had any reputation for knowledge. 
I have caused youths to be instructed in languages, geometry, 
arithmetic, the construction of tables and instruments, and many 
needful things besides." The difiiculties in the way of such studies 
as he had resolved to pursue were immense. He was without in- 
struments or means of experiment. " Without mathematical in- 
struments no science can be mastered," he complains afterward; 
"and these instruments are not to be found among the Latins, 
and could not be made for two or three hundred pounds. Be- 
sides, better tables are indispensably necessary, tables on which 
the motions of the heavens are certified from the beginning to 
the end of the world without daily labor ; but these tables are 
worth a king's ransom, and could not be made without a vast ex- 
pense. I have often attempted the composition of such tables, 
but could not finish them through failure of means and the folly 
of those whom I had to employ." Books were difficult and some- 
times even impossible to procure. " The scientific works of Aris- 
totle, of Avicenna, of Seneca, of Cicero, and other ancients, can not 
be had without great cost ; their principal works have not been 
translated into Latin, and copies of others are not to be found in 
ordinary libraries or elsewhere. The admirable books of Cicero 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



163 



de Republica are not to be found any where, so far as I can hear, 
though I ]]ave made anxious inquiry for them in different parts 
of the world, and by various messengers. I could never find the 
works of Seneca, though I made diligent search for them during 
twenty years and more. And so it is with many more most use- 
ful books connected with the sciences of morals." It is only words 
like these of his own that bring home to us the keen thirst for 
knowledge, the patience, the energy of Roger Bacon. He re- 
turned as a teacher to Oxford, and a touching record of his devo- 
tion to those whom he taught remains in the story of John of 
London, a boy of fifteen, whose ability raised him above the gen- 
eral level of his pupils. "When he came to me as a poor boy," 
says Bacon, in recommending him to the Pojdc, " I caused him to 
be nurtured and instructed for the love of God, especially since 
for aptitude and innocence I have never found so towardly a 
youth. Five or six years ago I caused him to be taught in lan- 
guages, mathematics, and optics, and I have gratuitously instruct- 
ed him with my own lips since the time that I received your man- 
date. There is no one at Paris who knows so much of the root 
of philosophy, though he has not produced the branches, flowers, 
and fruit laecause of his youth, and because he has had no experi- 
ence in teaching. But he has the means of surpassing all the 
Latins if he live to grow old and goes on as he has begun." 

The pride with which he refers to his system of instruction was 
justified by the wide extension which he gave to scientific teach- 
ing in Oxford. It is probably of himself that he speaks when he 
tells us that "the science of optics has not hitherto been lectured 
on at Paris or elsewhere among the Latins, save twice at Oxford." 
It was a science on which he had labored for ten years. But his 
teaching seems to have fallen on a barren soil. The whole tem- 
per of the age was against scientific or philosophical studies. The 
extension of freedom and commerce, even the diffusion of justice, 
were opening up practical channels for intellectual energy, more 
inviting because more immediately profitable than the path of 
abstract speculation. The older enthusiasm for knowledge was 
already dying down even at the Universities ; the study of law 
was the one source of promotion, whether in Church or State ; 
theology and philosophy Avere discredited, literature in its purer 
forms almost extinct. After forty years of incessant study. Bacon 
found himself in his own words " unheard, forgotten, buried." He 
seems at one time to have been wealthy, but his wealth was gone. 
"During the twenty years that I have specially labored in the 
attainment of wisdom, abandoning the path of common men, I 
have spent on these pursuits more than two thousand pounds, not 
to mention the cost of books, experiments, instruments, tables, the 
acquisition of languages, and the like. Add to all this the sacri- 
fices I have made to procure the friendship of the wise, and to ob- 
tain well-instructed assistants." Ruined and baffled in his hopes, 
Bacon listened to the counsels of his friend Grosseteste and re- 
nounced the world. He became a mendicant friar of the order 
of St. Francis, an order where books and study were looked upon 



Sec. IV. 



The Univer- 
sities. 



1G4 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap* 



as hinderances to the work which it had specially undertaken, that 
of preaching among the masses of the poor. He had written 
hardly any thing. So far was he from attempting to write, that 
his new superiors had prohibited him from publishing any thing 
under pain of forfeiture of the book and penance of bread and 
water. But we can see the craving of his mind, the passionate 
instinct of creation which marks the man of genius, in the joy 
with which he seized the strange opportunity which suddenly 
opened before him. " Some few chapters on difierent subjects, 
written at the entreaty of friends," seem to have got abroad, and 
were brought by one of his chaplains under the notice of Clement 
the Fourth. The Pope at once invited him to write. Again dif- 
ficulties stood in his way. Materials, transcription, and other ex- 
penses for such a work as he projected, would cost at least £60, 
and the Pope had not sent a penny. He begged help from his 
family, but they were ruined like himself. No one would lend to 
a mendicant friar, and when his friends raised the money it was 
by pawning their goods in tlie hope of repayment from Clement. 
Nor was this all : tlie work itself, abstruse and scientific as was 
its subject, had to be treated in a clear and popular form to gain 
the Papal ear. But difliculties which would have crushed an- 
other man only roused Roger Bacon to an almost superhuman 
energy. In little more than a year, the Annus Mirabilis of En- 
glish science, the work was done. The " greater work," itself in 
modern form a closely printed folio, with its successive summa- 
ries and appendices in the "lesser" and the "third" works (which 
make a good octavo more), were produced and forwarded to the 
Pope within fifteen months. 

No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book itself. The 
" Opus Majus" is alike wonderful in plan and detail. Bacon's 
main plan, in the words of Dr. Whewell, is " to urge the necessity 
of a reform in the mode of philosophizing, to set forth the reasons 
why knowledge had not made a greater progress, to draw back 
attention to sources of knowledge which had been unwisely neg- 
lected, to discover other sources which were yet wholly unknown, 
and to animate men to the undertaking by a prospect of the vast 
advantages which it offered." The development of his scheme is 
on the largest scale ; he gathers together the whole knowledge of 
his time on every branch of science which it possessed, and as he 
passes them in review he suggests improvements in nearly all. 
His labors, both here and in his after w^orks, in the field of gram- 
mar and jDhilology, his perseverance in insisting on the necessity 
of correct texts, of an accurate knowledge of languages, of an ex- 
act interpretation, are hardly less remarkable than his scientific 
investigations. But from grammar he passes to mathematics, 
from mathematics to experimental philosophy. Under the name 
of mathematics was included all the physical science of the time. 
" The neglect of it for nearly thirty or forty years," pleads Bacon 
passionately, " hath nearly destroyed the entire studies of Latin 
Christendom. For he who knows not mathematics can not know 
any other sciences ; and, what is more, he can not discover his own 



III.] 



THE GREAT CRABTEB. 



165 



ignorance or find its proper remedies." Geography, chronology, 
arithmetic, music, are brought into something of scientific form, 
and the same rapid examination is devoted to the question of cli- 
mate, to hydrography, geography, and astrology. The subject of 
optics, his own especial study, is treated with greater fullness ; he 
enters into the question of the anatomy of the eye, besides discuss- 
ing the problems which lie more strictly within the province of 
optical science. In a word, the " Greater Work," to borrow the 
phrase of Dr. Whewell, is " at once the Encyclopaedia and the 
Novum Organnm of the thirteenth century." The whole of the 
after works of Roger Bacon — and treatise after treatise have of 
late been disentombed from our libraries — are but developments 
in detail of the magnificent conception he had laid before Clement. 
Such a work was its own great reward. From the world around 
Roger Bacon could look for, and found, small recognition. No 
Avord of acknowledgment seems to have reached its author from 
the Pope. If we may credit a more recent story, his writings 
only gained him a prison from his order, "Unheard, forgotten, 
buried," the old man died as he had lived, and it has been re- 
served for later ages to roll away the obscurity that hath gath- 
ered around his memory, and to place first in the great roll of 
modern science the name of Roscer Bacon. 



Section V.— Henry tlie Tliird. 1217—1257. 

l_Aut/ionties. — The two great authorities for this period are the historiographers 
of St. Albans, Roger of Wendover, whose work ends in 1235, and his editor and cou- 
tinuator Matthew Paris. The first is full but inaccurate, and with strong royal and 
ecclesiastical sympathies : of the character of Matthew I have spoken at the close 
of the present section. The Chronicles of Dunstable, Waverley, and Burton (pub- 
lished in Mr. Luard's "Annales Monastici") supply many details. The "Royal 
Letters," edited by Dr. Shirlej'-, with an admirable preface, are, like the Patent and 
Close Rolls, of the highest value. For opposition to Rome, see " Grosseteste's Let- 
ters," edited by Mr. Luard.] 



The death of the Earl Mareschal left the direction of affairs in 
the hands of Hubert de Burgh. It was an age of transition, and 
tlie temper of the new Justiciary was eminently transitional. Bred 
in the school of Henry the Second, he had little sympathy with the 
Charter or national freedom ; his conception of good government, 
like that of his master, lay in a wise personal administration, in the 
preservation of order and law ; but he combined with this a thor- 
oughly English desire for national independence, a hatred of for- 
eigners, and a reluctance to waste English blood and treasure in 
Continental struggles. Able as he proved himself, his task was 
one of no common difficulty. He was hampered by the constant 
interference of Rome. A Papal legate resided at the English 
Court, and claimed a share in the administration of the realm as 
the representative of its over-lord and as the guardian of the young 
sovereign. A foreign party, too, was still established in the king- 
dom, and the Court remained eager to plunge into foreign wars for 



Sec. V. 

Heney the 
Thieb. 

1217- 
1257. 



Hubert de 
Burgli. 



16( 



HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the recovery of its lost domains. But it was with tlie general an- 
archy that Hubert had first to deal. From the time of the Con- 
quest the centre of England had been covered with the domains 
of great houses, whose longings were for feudal independence, and 
whose spirit of revolt had been held in check, partly by the stern 
rule of the kings, and partly by their creation of a baronage sprung 
from the Court and settled for the most part in the North, the 
" new men" of Henry the First and Henry the Second. The op- 
pression of John united both the older and the newer houses in 
the struggle for the Charter, but the character of each remained 
unchanged, and the close of the struggle saw the feudal party 
break out in their old lawlessness and defiance of the Crown. For 
a time the anarchy of Stephen's days seemed revived. But the 
royal power was still great, and it was backed by the strenuous 
eflTorts of Stephen Langton. The Earl of Chester, the head of the 
feudal baronage, who had risen in armed rebellion, quailed before 
the march of Hubert and the Primate's threats of excommunica- 
tion. A more formidable foe remained in the Frenchman, Faukes 
de Breaute, the sherifi" of six counties, with six royal castles in his 
hands, and allied both with the rebel barons and Llewellyn of 
Wales. His castle of Bedford was besieged for two months be- 
fore its surrender, and the stern justice of Stephen Langton hung 
the twenty-four knights and their retainers who formed the gar- 
rison before its walls while the lay lords, who would have spared 
them, were gone to dinner. The blow was effectual ; the royal 
castles were surrendered by the barons, and the land was once 
more at peace. The services which Steplien Langton rendered to 
public order were small compared with his services to English free-^ 
dom. Throughout his life the Charter was the first object of his 
care. The omission of the articles which restricted the royal pow- 
er over taxation, without the assent of the great Council, in the 
Charter which was published at Henry's coronation, was doubt- 
less due to the Archbishop's absence and disgrace at Rome, for- 
his return is marked by a second issue, in which tlie omission is 
remedied, while a sej)arate Charter of the Forest was added. No 
man for the time to come was to lose life or limb for taking the 
royal venison, and the recent extensions of the royal forest were 
roughly curtailed. The suppression of disorder seems to have re- 
vived the older spirit of resistance among the royal ministers; 
when Langton demanded a fresh confirmation of the Charter in 
Parliament at Oxford, William Brewer, one of the King's coun- 
selors, protested that it had been extorted by force, and was with- 
out legal validity. " If you loved the King, William," the Primate 
burst out in anger, " you would not throw a stumbling in the way 
of the peace of the realm." The King was cowed by the Arch- 
bishop's wrath, and at once promised the observance of the Char- 
ter. Two years after, its solemn promulgation was demanded by 
the Archbishop and the barons as the jDrice of a new subsidy, and 
the great principle that redress of wrongs precedes a grant to the 
Crown was established as a part of our constitution. 
The death of Stephen Langton left Hubert alone in the adminis- 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHAETEB. 



167 



tration of the kingdom, for the Archbishop had extorted from the 
Pope the withdrawal of the resident legate. But every year 
found the Justiciary at greater variance with Rome and with the 
temper of the King. In the mediaeval theory of the Papacy, the 
constitution of the Church took the purely feudal form of the sec- 
ular kingdoms around it, with the Pope for sovereign, bishops for 
his barons, the clergy for his under vassals. As the King de- 
manded aids and subsidies in case of need from his liege men, so 
it was believed might the head of the Church from the priesthood. 
During the ministry of Hubert, the Papacy, exhausted by the long- 
struggle with Frederick the Second, grew more and more extortion- 
ate in its demands, till the death of Langton saw them culminate 
in a demand of a tenth from the whole realm of England. The 
demand was at once rejected by the baronage, but a threat of ex- 
communication silenced the murmurs of the clergy. Exaction fol- 
lowed exaction, the very rights of the lay patrons were set aside, 
and presentations to benefices (under the name of "reserves") 
were sold in the Papal market, while Italian clergy were quar- 
tered on the best livings of the Church, The general indignation 
found vent at last in a wide conspiracy; letters from "the whole 
body of those who prefer to die rather than be ruined by the Ro- 
mans" were scattei'ed over the kingdom by armed men, the tithes 
gathered for the Pojje and foreign clergy were seized and given to 
the poor, the Papal commissioners beaten, and their bulls trodden 
underfoot. The remonstrances of Rome only revealed the nation- 
al character of the movemeiit, but as inquiry proceeded, the hand 
of the minister himself was seen to have been at work. Sheriffs 
had stood idly by while the violence was done ; royal letters had 
been exhibited by the rioters, and the Pope openly laid the charge 
of the outbreak on the secret connivance of Hubert de Burgh. 
The charge came at a time when his purely insular policy had 
alienated Henry himself from a minister to whom the King attrib- 
uted the failure of his attempts to regain the foreign dominions 
of his house. An invitation from the barons of Norraandj' had 
been rejected through Hubert's remonstrances, and when a great 
armament gathered at Portsmouth for a campaign in Poitou, it 
was dispersed for want of transport or supplies. The young King 
drew his sword and rushed madly on the Justiciary, whom he 
charged with treason and corruption by the gold of France, but 
the influence of Hubert again succeeded in deferring the expedi- 
tion. The failure of the campaign in the following year, when 
Henry took the field in Brittany and Poitou, w^as again laid at the 
door of the Justiciary, whose opposition had prevented an engage- 
ment, and the intrigues of Rome were hardly wanting to procure 
his fall. He was dragged from a chapel at Brentwood, where he 
had taken refuge, and a smith was ordered to shackle him. "I 
will die any death," replied the smith, " before I put iron on the 
man who freed England from the stranger and saved Dover from 
France." On the remonstrance of the Bishop of London, Hubert 
was replaced in sanctuary, but hunger compelled him to surrender ; 
he was thrown a prisoner into the Tower, and England w^as left 



168 



HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



to the rule of royal favorites and to the weakness and caprice of 
Henry himself. 

There was a certain refinement in Henry's temper which won 
him affection even in the worst days of his rule. The abbey 
church of Westminster, with which he replaced the ruder minster 
of the Confessor, remains a monument of his artistic taste. He 
was a patron and friend of artists and men of letters, and himself 
skilled in the "gay science" of the troubadour. From the cruelty, 
the lust, the impiety of his father he was absolutely free. But he 
was utterly devoid of the political capacity which had been the 
characteristic of John, as of his race. His conception of power 
lay in the display of an emjDty and j)rofuse magnificence. JBYivo- 
lous, changeable, impulsive alike in good and evil, false from sheer 
meanness of spirit, childishly superstitious, we can trace but one 
strong political drift in Henry's mind, a longing to recover the 
Continental dominions of his predecessors, to surround himself, 
like them, with foreigners, and, without any express break with 
the Charter, to imitate the foreign character of their rule. The 
death of Langton, the fall of Hubert de Burgh, enabled him to in- 
dulge his preference for aliens, and hordes of hungry Poitevins 
and Bretons were at once summoned over to occupy the royal 
castles and fill the judicial and administrative posts about the 
Court. His marriage with Eleanor of Provence was followed by 
the arrival in England of the Queen's uncles: one was enriched 
by the grant of Richmondshire ; the Savoy palace in the Strand 
still recalls the magnificence of a second, Peter of Savoy, who was 
raised for a time to the chief place in council ; Boniface, a third, 
was promoted to the highest post in the I'ealm save the crown it- 
self, the Ai'chbishopric of Canterbury. The young Primate, like 
his brother, brought with him foreign fashions strange enough to 
English folk. His armed retainers pillaged the markets. His own 
archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground the prior of St. Bartholo- 
mew-by-Smithfield, who opposed his visitation. London was roused 
by the outrage, and on the King's refusal to do justice a noisy 
crowd of citizens surrounded the Primate's house at Lambeth with 
cries of vengeance. The " handsome archbishop," as his followers 
styled him, was glad to escape over- sea; but the brood of Pro- 
ven9als was soon followed by the arrival of the Poitevin relatives 
of John's queen, Isabella of Angouleme. Aymer was made Bish- 
op of Winchester ; William of Valence received the earldom of 
Pembroke. Even the King's jester was a Poitevin. Hundreds 
of their dependents followed these great lords to find a fortune in 
the English realm. Peter of Savoy brought in his train a bevy 
of ladies in search of husbands, and three English earls who were 
in royal wardship were wedded by the King to foreigners. The 
whole machinery of administration passed into the hands of men 
ignorant and contemptuous of the principles of English govern- 
ment or English law. Their rule was a mere anarchy; the very 
retainers of the royal household turned robbers, and pillaged for- 
eign merchants in the precincts of the Court ; corruption invaded 
the judicature; Henry de Batt, a justiciary, was proved to have 



III.] 



TEE GREAT CRABTEB. 



169 



openly taken bribes and to have adjudged to himself disputed 
estates. Meanwhile the royal treasure was squandered in a friv- 
olous attempt to wrest Poitou from the grasp of France. The 
attempt ended in failure and shame. At Taillebourg the forces 
under Henry fled in disgraceful rout before the French as far as 
Saintes, and only the sudden illness of Lewis the Ninth and a 
disease which scattered his army saved Bordeaux from the con- 
querors. 

That misgovernment of this kind should have gone on for twenty 
years unchecked, in defiance of the provisions of the Charter, was 
owing to the disunion and sluggishness of the English baronage. 
On the first arrival of the foreigners, Richard, the third Earl Mare- 
schal, had stood forth as their leader to demand the expulsion of 
the strangers from the royal council, and though deserted by the 
bulk of the nobles, he had defeated the foreign forces sent against 
him, released Hubert de Burgh, and forced the King to treat for 
peace. At this critical moment, however, the Earl fell in an Irish 
skirmish, and the barons were left without a head. In the long 
interval of misrule which followed, the financial straits of the 
King forced him to heap exaction on exaction. The Forest Laws 
were used as a means of extortion, sees and abbeys were kept 
vacant, loans were wrested from lords and prelates, the Court it- 
self lived at free quarters wherever it moved. Supplies of this 
kind, however, were utterly insufiicient to defray the cost of the 
King's prodigality. A sixth of the royal revenue was wasted in 
pensions to foreign favorites. The debts of the Crown mounted 
to four times its annual income. !^ Henry was forced to appeal for 
aid to the great Council of the realm, and aid was granted on con- 
dition that the King confirmed the Charter. The Charter was 
confirmed and steadily disregarded ; and the resentment of the 
barons expressed itself in a determined protest and a refusal of 
further subsidies. In a few years Henry's necessities drove him 
to a new appeal, and the growing resolution of the nobles to en- 
force good government was seen in their ofier of a grant on con- 
dition that the chief officers of the Crown were appointed by the 
great Council. Heniry iiadign an tJy refused the offer, and sold his 
plate to the merchants of London. From the Church he encount- 
ered as resolute an opposition. The resistance of the Earl Mare- 
schal had been vigorously backed by Edmund Ricli, whom we 
have seen as an Oxford teacher, and who had risen to the Arch- 
bishopric of Canterbury. The threats and remonstrances of the 
Primate had forced the King to an accommodation with the Earl, 
Avhen his death dashed all hope of reform to the ground. But the 
policy of John made it easy to bridle the Church by the inter- 
vention of the Papacy, and at Henry's request a nuncio now ap- 
peared in the realm. The scourge of Papal taxation fell again on 
the clei-gy. After vain appeals to Rome and to the King, Arch- 
bishop Edmund retired to an exile of despair at Pontigny, and 
tax-gatherer after tax-gatherer, with powers of excommunication, 
suspension from orders, and presentation to benefices, descended 
on the unhappy priesthood. The wholesale pillage kindled a 



1'70 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



wide siDirit of resistance. Oxford gave the signal by hunting the 
Papal legate, Otho, out of the city, amid cries of " usurer" and 
" simoniac" from the mob of students. Fulk Fitz-Warenne, in 
the name of the barons, bade Martin, a Papal collector, begone 
out of England. " If you tarry three days longer," he added, 
" you and your company shall be cut to pieces." For a time 
Henry himself was swept away by the tide of national indigna- 
tion. Letters from the King, the nobles, and the prelates pro- 
tested against the Papal exactions, and orders were given that no 
money should be exported from the realm. But the threat of in- 
terdict soon drove Henry back on a policy of spoliation, in which 
he went hand in hand with Rome. 

The story of this period of misrule has been preserved for us by 
an annalist whose pages glow with the new outburst of patriotic 
feeling which this common expression of the people and the clei'gy 
had produced. Matthew Paris is the greatest, as he is in reality 
the last, of our monastic historians. The school of St. Albans sur- 
vived indeed till a far later time, but the writers dwindle into 
mere annalists whose view is bounded by the abbey precincts, and 
whose work is as colorless as it is jejune. In Matthew the breadth 
and precision of the narrative, the copiousness of his information 
on topics whether national or European, the general fairness and 
justice of his comments, are only surpassed by the jjatriotic fire 
and enthusiasm of the whole. He had succeeded Roger of W'cn- 
dover as chronicler of St. Albans; and the Greater Chronicle, with 
the abridgment of it which has Jong jDassed under the name of 
Matthew of Westminster, a "History of the English," and the 
"Lives of the Earlier Abbots," were only a few among the vo- 
luminous works which attested his prodigious industry. He was 
an eminent artist as well as an historian, and many of the manu- 
scripts which are preserved are illustrated by his own hand. A 
large circle of correspondents — bishops like Grosseteste, ministers 
like Hubert de Burgh, officials like Alexander de Swinford — fur- 
nished him with minute accounts of political and ecclesiastical 
proceedings. Pilgrims from the East and Papal agents brought 
news of foreign events to his scriptorium at St. Albans. He liad 
access to and quotes largely from state documents, charters, and 
exchequer rolls. The frequency of the royal visits to the abbey 
brought him a store of political intelligence, and Henry himself 
contributed to the great chronicle which has preserved with so 
terrible a faithfulness the memory of his weakness and misgovern- 
ment. On one solemn feast-day the King recognized Matthew, 
and, bidding him sit on the middle step between the floor and the 
throne, begged him to write the story of the day's proceedings. 
While on a visit to St. Albans he invited him to his table and 
chamber, and enumerated by name two hundred and fifty of the 
English baronies for liis information. But all this royal patronage 
has left little mark on his work. "The case," as he says, " of his- 
torical writers is hard, for if they tell the truth they provoke men, 
and if they write what is false they offend God." With all the 
fullness of the school of court historians, such as Benedict or Hove- 



III.] 



THE GREAT CRABTEB. 



\n 



den, Matthew Paris combines an independence and patriotism 
which is strange to their pages. He denounces witli the same 
unsparing energy the oppression of the Papacy and the King. 
His point of view is neither that of a courtier nor of a Church- 
man, but of an Englishman, and the new national tone of his 
chronicle is but an echo of the national sentiment which at last 
bound nobles and yeomen and Churchmen together into an En- 
glish people. 

Section VI.— TIae Friars'. 

[Authorities. — Eccleston's Tract on their arrival in England and Adam de Maris- 
co's Letters, with Mr. Brewer's admirable Preface, in the "Monumenta Francis- 
cana" of the Rolls Series. Grosseteste's Letters in the same series, edited by Mr. 
Luard. For a general account of the whole movement, see Milman's "Latin Chris- 
tianity," vol. iv., caps. 9 and 10.] 



From the tedious record of misgovernment and political weak- 
ness which stretches over the forty years we have passed through, 
we turn with relief to the story of the Friars. 

Never, as we have seen, had the priesthood wielded such bound- 
less power over Christendom as in the days of Innocent the Third 
and his immediate successors. But its religious hold on the peo- 
ple was loosening day by day. The old reverence for the Papacy 
faded away before the universal resentment at its political ambi- 
tion, its ruthless exactions, its lavish use of interdict and excom- 
munication for purely secular ends, its degradation of the most 
sacred sentences into means of financial extortion. In Italy, the 
struggle between Rome and Frederick the Second had disclosed 
a spirit of skepticism which among the Epicurean poets of Flor- 
ence denied the immortality of the soul, and attacked the very 
foundations of the faith itself. In Southern Gaul, Languedoc and 
Provence had embraced the heresy of the Albigenses, and thrown 
off all allegiance to the Papacy. Even in England, though there 
were no signs as yet of religious revolt, the indignation of the peo- 
ple against Rome, its ceaseless exactions and monstrous alliance 
with the tyranny of the Crown, broke out in murmurs which pre- 
luded the open defiance of the Lollards. " The Pope has no part 
in secular matters," had been the reply of Lowdon to the interdict 
of Honorius. When the resistance of an A/chbishop of York to 
the Papal demands was met by excommunication, " the people 
blessed him the more, the more the Pope cursed him." The no- 
blest among English prelates. Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln, died 
at feud with the Roman Court ; the noblest of English patriots, 
Earl Simon of Montfort, was soon to die beneath its ban. The 
same loss of spiritual power, the same severance from national feel- 
ing, was seen in the English Church itself Plundered and humili- 
ated as they were by Rome, the worldliness of the bishops, tJie op- 
pression of their ecclesiastical courts, the disuse of preaching, the 
decline of the monastic orders into rich land-owners, the non-resi- 
dence and ignorance of the parish priests, robbed the clergy of all 



172 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



spiritual influence. The abuses of the time foiled even the energy 
of Grosseteste. His constitutions forbid the clergy to haunt tav- 
erns, to gamble, to share in drinking-bouts, to mix in the riot and 
debauchery of the life of the baronage. But his jsrohibitions only 
witness to the prevalence of the evils they denounce. Bishops and 
deans were withdrawn from their ecclesiastical duties to act as 
ministers, judges, or embassadors. Benefices were heaped in hun- 
dreds at a time on royal favorites, like John Mansel. The Popes 
thrust boys of twelve years old into the wealthiest English liv- 
ings. Abbeys absorbed the tithes of parishes, and then served 
them by half-starved vicars. Exemptions purchased from Rome 
shielded the scandalous lives of canons and monks from all episco- 
pal discipline. 

To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church 
was the aim of two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life 
at the opening of the thirteenth century. Tlie zeal of the Spaniard 
Dominic was aroused at the sight of the lordly prelates who sought 
by fire and sword to win the Albigensian heretics to the faith. 
"Zeal," he cried, "must be met by zeal, lowliness by lowliness, 
false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching lies by preaching truth." 
His fiery ardor and rigid orthodoxy were seconded by the mys- 
tical piety, the imaginative enthusiasm of Francis of Assisi, The 
life of Francis falls like a stream of tender light across the dark- 
ness of the time. In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of Daftte 
we see him take Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all : 
he flings his very clothes at his father's feet, that he may be one 
with Nature and God. His passionate verse claims the moon for 
his sister and the sun for his brother; he calls on his brother the 
Wind, and his sister the "Water. His last faint cry was a " Wel- 
come, Sister Death !" Strangely as the two men differed from each 
othei*, their aim was the same, to convert the heathen, to extirpate 
heresy, to reconcile knowledge with orthodoxy, to carry the Gos- 
pel to the poor. The work was to be done by the entire reversal 
of the older monasticism, by seeking personal salvation in effort 
for the salvation of their fellow-men, by exchanging the solitary 
of the cloister for the preacher, the monk for the friar. To force 
the new " brethren" into entire dependence on those among whom 
they labored the vow of Poverty was turned into a stern reality ; 
the "Begging Friars" were to subsist on the alms of the poor, 
they might possess neither money nor lands, the very houses in 
which they lived were to be held in trust for them by others. The 
tide of popular eiithusiasm which welcomed their appearance swept 
before it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older orders, 
the opposition of the parochial priesthood. Thousands of brethren 
gathered in a few years around Francis and Dominic, and the beg- 
ging preachers, clad in their coarse frock of serge, with the girdle 
of rope around their waist, wandered barefooted as missionaries 
over Asia, battled with heresy in Italy and Gaul, lectured in the 
Universities, and preached and toiled among the poor. 

To the toAvns especially the coming of the Friars was a religious 
revolution. They had been left for the most part to the worst and 



ni.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



173 



most ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose whole subsist- 
ence lay in his fees. Burgher and artisan were left to spell out 
what religious instruction they might from the gorgeous ceremo- 
nies of the Church's ritual or the scriptural pictures and sculptures 
which were graven on the walls of its minsters. We can hard- 
ly wonder at the burst of enthusiasm Avhich welcomed the itin- 
erant preacher, whose fervid appeal, coarse wit, and familiar story 
brought religion into the fair and the market-place. The Black 
Friars of Dominic, the Gray Friars of Francis, were received with 
the same delight. As the older orders had chosen the country, 
the Friars chose the town. They had hardly landed at Dover 
before they made straight for London and Oxford. In their ig- 
norance of the road the two first Gray Brothers lost their way in 
the woods between Oxford and Baldon, and, fearful of night and 
of the floods, turned aside to a grange of the monks of Abingdon. 
Their ragged clothes and foreign gestures, as they prayed for hos- 
pitality, led the porter to take them for jongleurs, the jesters and 
jugglers of the clay, and the news of this break in the monotony 
of their lives brought prior, sacrist, and cellarer to the door to 
welcome them and witness their tricks. The disappointment was 
too much for the temper of the monks, and the brothers were kick- 
ed roughly from the gate to find their night's lodging under a 
tree. But the welcome of the townsmen made up every where for 
the ill-will and opposition of both clergy and monks. The work 
of the Friars was physical as well as moral. The rapid progress 
of the population within the boroughs had outstripped the sanitary 
regulations of the Middle Ages, and fever or plague, or the more 
terrible scourge of leprosy, festered in the wretched hovels of the 
suburbs. It was to haunts such as these that Francis had pointed 
his discijDles, and the Gray Brethren at once fixed themselves in 
the meanest and poorest quarters of each town. Their first work 
lay in the noisome lazar-houses ; it was among the lepers that 
they commonly chose the site of their houses. At London they 
settled in the shambles of Newgate ; at Oxford they made their 
way to the swampy ground between the walls and the streams of 
Thames. Huts of mud and timber, as mean as the huts around 
them, rose within the rough fence and ditch that bounded the Fri- 
ary. The order of Francis made a hard fight against the taste for 
sumptuous buildings and for greater personal comfort which char- 
acterized the time, " I did not enter into religion to build walls," 
protested an English provincial, when the brethren pressed for a 
larger house ; and Albert of Pisa ordered a stone cloister which 
the burgesses of Southampton had built for them to be razed to 
the ground. "You need no little mountains to lift your heads to 
heaven," was his scornful reply to a claim for pillows. None but 
the sick went shod. An Oxford Friar found a pair of shoes one 
morning, and wore them' at matins. At night he dreamed that 
robbers leaped on him in a dangerous pass between Gloucester 
and Oxford, with shouts of " Kill, kill !" " I am a friar," shrieked 
the terror-stricken brother. "You lie," was the instant answer, 
"for you go shod." The Friar lifted up his foot in disproof, but 



IH 



HISTORY OF TEE ENaLISR PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the shoe was there. In an agony of repentance he awoke and flung 
the pair out of window. 

It was with less success that the order struggled against the 
passion for knowledge. Their vow of poverty, rigidly interpreted 
as it was by their founders, would have denied them the possession 
of books or materials for study. "I am your breviary, I am your 
breviary," Francis cried passionately to a novice who asked for a 
Psalter. When the news of a great doctor's reception was brought 
to him at Paris, his countenance fell. " I am afraid, my son," he 
replied, " that such doctors will be the destruction of my vine- 
yard. They are the true doctors who, with the meekness of wis- 
dom, show tbrth good works for the edification of their neighbors." 
At a later time Roger Bacon, as we have seen, was suffered to pos- 
sess neither ink, parchment, nor books ; and only the Pope's in- 
junctions could dispense with the stringent observance of the rule. 
But while the work of the Friars among the sick and lepers drew 
them, as we have seen in Bacon's life, to the cultivation of the phys- 
ical sciences, the popularity of their preaching soon led them to 
the deeper study of theology. Within a short time after their es- 
tablishment in England we find as many as thirty readers or lect- 
urers appointed at Hereford, Leicester, Bristol, and other places, 
and a regular succession of teachers provided at each University. 
The Oxford Dominicans lectured on theology in the nave of their 
new church, while philosophy was taught in the cloister. The fii'st 
provincial of the Gray Friars built a school in their Oxford house, 
and persuaded Grosseteste to lecture there. His influence after his 
promotion to the see of Lincoln was steadily exerted to secure study 
among the Friars, and their establishment in the University. He 
was ably seconded by his scholar, Adam Marsh, or De Marisco, un- 
der whom the Franciscan school at Oxford attained a reputation 
throughout Christendom. Lyons, Paris, and Cologne borrowed from 
it their professors : it was owing, indeed, to its influence tliat Ox- 
ford now rose to a position hardly inferior to that of Paris itself 
The three most profound and original of the schoolmen — Roger Ba- 
con, Duns Scotus, and Ockham — were among its scholars; and they 
were followed by a crowd of teachers hardly less illustrious in their 
day, such as Bungay, Burley, and Archbishop Peckham. Theology, 
which had been almost superseded by the more lucrative studies 
of the Canon Law, resumed its old supremacy in the schools ; 
while Aristotle — who, as we have seen in the life of Bacon, had 
been so long held at bay as the most dangerous foe of the medi- 
aeval faith — was now turned by the adoption of liis logical method 
into its unexpected allJ^ It was this very method that led to that 
" unprofitable subtlety and curiosity" which Lord Bacon notes as 
the vice of the scholastic philosophy. But "certain it is," to con- 
tinue the same great thinker's comment on the Friars, " that if 
these schoolmen, to their great thirst of truth and unwearied trav- 
el of wit had joined variety of reading and contemplation, they 
had proved excellent lights to the great advancement of all learn- 
ing and knowledge." What, amid all their errors, they undoubt- 
edly did was to substitute the appeal to reason for the mere un- 



III.] 



TEE GBEAT CRAETER. 



175 



questioning obedience to authority, to insist on the necessity of 
rigid demonstration and an exacter use of words, and to introduce 
a clear and methodical treatment of all subjects into discussion. 

It is to the new clearness and precision which they gave to sci- 
entific inquiry, as well as to the strong popular sympathies which 
their very constitution necessitated, tliat we must attribute the in- 
fluence which the Friars undoubtedly exerted on the coming strug- 
gle between the people and the Crown. Their position throughout 
tlie whole contest is strongly and clearly marked. The University 
of Oxford, which had now fallen under the direction of their teach- 
ing, stood first in its resistance to Papal exactions and its claim 
of English liberty. The classes in the towns on whom the influ- 
ence of the Friars told most directly are steady supporters of free- 
dom throughout the Barons' War, Adam Marsh was the close 
friend and confidant both of Grosseteste and Earl Simon of Mont- 
fort. 

Section VII.— Tlie Barons' "War. 1258—1265. 

[_Autliorities. — At the very outset of tliis important period we lose the priceless 
aid of Matthew Paris. He is the last of the great chroniclers ; the Chronicles of 
his successor at St. Albans, Rishanger (published by the Master of the Rolls), are 
scant and Ufeless jottings, somewhat enlarged for this period by his fragment on tlie 
Barons' War (published by Camden Society). Something may be gleaned from the 
annals of Burton, Melrose, Dunstaple, Waverley, Osney, and Lanercost, the Royal 
Letters, the (royalist) Chronicle of Wykes, and (for London) the "Liber de Anti- 
quis Legibus." Mr. Blaauw has given a useful summary of the period in his 
"Barons' War."] 

When a thunder-storm once forced the King, as he was rowing 
on the Thames, to take refuge at the palace of the Bishop of Dur- 
ham, Earl Simon of Montfort, who was a guest of the prelate, met 
the royal barge with assurances that the storm was drifting away, 
and that there was nothing to fear, Henry's petuTatit wit broke 
out in his reply. " I fear thunder and lightning not a little. Lord 
Simon," said the King, " but I fear you more than all the thunder 
and lightning in the world," 

The man whom Henry dreaded as the future champion of En- 
glish freedom was himself a foreigner, the son of a Simon de Mont- 
fort whose name had become memorable for his ruthless crusade 
against the Albigensian heretics in Southern Gaul, As second 
son of this crusader, Simon became possessor of the English earl- 
dom of Leicester, which had passed by marriage to his family, and 
a secret match with Eleanor, the King's sister and widow of the 
Earl Mareschal, raised him to kindred with the throne. The bar- 
onage, indignant at this sudden alliance with a stranger, rose in a 
revolt which failed only through the desertion of their head. Earl 
Richard of Cornwall ; while the censures of the Church on Eleanor's 
breach of a vow of chastity, which she had made at her first hus- 
band's death, were hardly averted by a journey to Rome and a 
year's crusade in Palestine. Simon returned to find the change- 
able King alienated from him, and to be driven by a burst of royal 
passion from the realm ; but he was soon restored to favor, and ap- 



176 



SISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



pointed Governor of Gascony, where the stern justice of his rule 
earned the hatred of the disorderly baronage, and the heavy tax- 
ation which his enforcement of order made necessary estranged 
from him the burgesses of Bordeaux. The complaints of the 
Gascons brought about an open breach with the King. To Earl 
Simon's offer of the surrender of his jjost if the mone}'- he had spent 
in the royal service were, as Henry had j^romised, repaid hira, the 
King hotly retorted that he was bound by no promise to a false 
traitor. The Earl at once gave Henry the lie — " Were he not 
King, he should pay dearly for the insult," he said — and returned 
to Gascony, to be soon superseded, and forced to seek shelter in 
France. The greatness of his reputation was shown in the offer 
which was made to him in his exile of the regency of France dur- 
ing the absence of St. Lewis at the Crusade. On his refusal he 
was suffered to return to England and re-enter the royal service. 
His character had now thoroughly developed. He had inherited 
the strict and severe piety of his father; he was assiduous in his 
attendance on religious services, whether by night or day; he was 
the friend of Grosseteste and the patron of the Friars. In liis cor- 
respondence with Adam Marsh we see him finding patience under 
his Gascon troubles in the perusal of the Book of Job. His life 
was pure and singularly temperate ; he was noted for his scant 
indulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful and 
pleasant in talk; but his natural temper was quick and fiery, 'his 
sense of honor keen, his speech rapid and trenchant. "You shall 
go or die," we find him replying to William of Valence, wlien he 
refused to obey the orders of the barons and quit the realm. But 
the one characteristic which overmastered all was what men at 
that time called his " constancy," the firm, immovable resolve 
which trampled even death underfoot in its loyalty to the right. 
The motto which Edward the First chose as his device, "Keep 
troth," was far truer as the device of Earl Simon. We see in the 
correspondence of Friar Adam with what a clear discernment of 
its difficulties both at home and abroad he "thought it unbecom- 
ing to decline the danger of so great an exploit" as the reduction 
of Gascony to peace and order; but once undertaken, he jjerse- 
vered in spite of the opposition of the baronage, the short-sighted- 
ness of the merchant class, the failure of all support or funds from 
England, and at last the King's desertion of his cause, till the 
work was done. There is the same steadiness of will and purpose 
in his patriotism. The letters of Marsh and Grosseteste show how 
early he had learned to sympathize with the bishop in his strug- 
gle for the reform of the "Church and his resistance to Eome, and 
at the crisis of the contest he offers him his own support and that 
of his associates. He sends to Marsh a tract of Grosseteste's on 
"the rule of a kingdom and of a tyrannj'," sealed with his own seal. 
He listens patiently to the advice of his friends on the subject of 
his household or his temper. " Better is a patient man," writes 
the honest Friar, " than a strong man, and he who can rule his 
own temper than he who storms a city." " What use is it to pro- 
vide for the peace of your fellow-citizens and not guard the peace 



III.] 



TSE GREAT CHAETEE. 



177 



of your own household ?" It was to secure "the peace of his fel- 
low-citizens" that the Earl silently trained himself in the ten years 
that followed his return to England, and the fruit of his discipline 
Avas seen when the crisis came. While other men wavered and 
faltered and fell away, the enthusiastic love of the people gathered 
itself around the stern, grave soldier who "stood like a pillar," un- 
shaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by the oath he had 
tJworn. 

While Simon stood silently by, things went from bad to worse. 
The Pope still weighed heavily on the Church, and even excom- 
municated the Archbishop of York for resistance to his exactions. 
The barons were mutinous and defiant. "I will send reapers, and 
reap your fields for you," Henry had threatened Earl Bigod of 
Norfolk, when he refused him aid. "And I will send you back 
the heads of your reapers," retorted the Earl. Hampered by the 
provisions of the Charter against arbitrary taxation, and by the 
refusal of the baronage to grant supplies while grievances were 
unredressed, the Crown was penniless, yet new expenses were in- 
curred by Henry's acceptance of a Papal ofier of the kingdom of 
Sicily in favor of his second son Edmund. Shame had fallen on 
the English arms, and Edward had been disastrously defeated on 
the Marches by Llewellyn of Wales. The tide of discontent, which 
was heightened by a grievous famine, bui'st its bounds when the 
King seized and sold corn which his brother, Richard of Cornwall, 
had sent from Germany to relieve the general distress; and the 
barons repaired in arms to a great Council summoned at Oxford. 
The past half-century had shown both the strength and weakness 
of the Charter: its strength as a rallying-point for the baronage, 
and a definite assertion of rights which the King could be made to 
acknowledge ; its weakness in providing no means for the enforce- 
ment of its own stipulations. Henry had sworn again and again 
to observe the Charter, and his oath was no sooner taken than it 
was unscrupulously broken. The barons had secui'ed the freedom 
of the realm; the secret of their long patience during the reign of 
Henry lay in the diificulty of securing its administration. It was 
this difficulty Avhich Earl Simon was prepared to solve. With the 
Earl of Gloucester he now appeared at the head of the bai'on- 
age, and demanded the appointment of a committee to draw up 
terms for the representation of the state. Although half the com- 
mittee consisted of royal ministers and favorites, it was irajDOSsible 
to resist the tide of popular feeling, and the new Royal Council 
named by it consisted wholly of adherents of the barons. In the 
Provisions of Oxford the Justiciary, Chancellor, and the guardians 
of the King's castles swore to act only with the advice and assent 
of this Royal Council. The first two great officers,with the Treas- 
urer, were to give account of their proceedings to it at the end of 
the year. Annual sheriifs were to be appointed from among the 
chief tenants of the county, and no fees were to be exacted for the 
administration of justice in their court. Three Parliaments were 
to assemble every year, whether summoned by the King or not. 

12 



178 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



The "commonalty" was to "elect twelve honest men who shall 
come to the Parliaments and other times when occasion shall be, 
when the King or his council shall send for them, to treat of the 
wants of the King and of his kingdom ; and the commonalty 
shall hold as established that which these twelve shall do," A 
royal proclamation in the English tongue, the first in that tongue 
which has reached us, ordered the observance of these Provisions. 
Resistance came only from the foreign favorites, and an armed 
demonstration drove them in flight over-sea. Gradually the Coun- 
cil drew to itself the whole royal power, and the policy of the ad- 
ministration was seen in its prohibitions against any further pay- 
ments, secular or ecclesiastical, to Rome ; in the negotiations con- 
ducted by Earl Simon with France, which finally ended in the ab- 
solute renunciation of Henry's title to his lost provinces; and in 
the peace which put an end to the incursions of the Welsh. With- 
in, however, the measures of the barons were feeble and selfish. 
The further Provisions, published by them under popular pressure 
in the following year, showed that the majority of them aimed 
simply at the establishment of a governing aristocracy. All no- 
bles and prelates were exempted from attendance at the sheriff's 
court, and inquiry was ordered to be made by what right and war- 
ranty men whose fathers were serfs passed themselves off for free- 
men. It was in vain that Earl Simon returned from his negotia- 
tions in France to press for more earnest measures of reform', or 
that Edward, ever watchful to seize the moment of dissension 
among the barons, openly supported him ; Gloucester with the 
feudal party was only driven into close alliance with the King; 
and Henry, procuring a bill of absolution from the Pope, seized 
the Tower, and by public proclamation ordered the counties to pay 
no obedience to the ofiicer^ nominated by the barons. 

Deserted as he was, the Earl of Leicester showed no sign of sub- 
mission. Driven for the moment into exile, he returned to find 
the barons again irritated by Henry's measures of reaction, while 
the death of the Earl of Gloucester I'emoved the greatest obsta- 
cle to effective reform. At the Parliament of London a civil war 
seemed imminent, but against^ the will of Earl Simon a compro- 
mise was agreed on, and the question of the Provisions was re- 
ferred to the arbitration of King Lewis of France. Mutual dis- 
trust, however, prevented any real accommodation. The marcli 
of Edward Avith a royal army against Llewellyn of Wales was 
viewed by the barons as a prelude to hostilities against them- 
selves ; and Earl Simon at once swept the Marches and besieged 
Dover. His power was strengthened by the attitude of the towns. 
The new democratic spirit which we have witnessed in the Friars 
was now stirring the purely industrial classes to assert a share in 
the municipal administration, which had hitherto been confined 
to the wealthier members of the merchant guild ; and at London 
and elsewhere a revolution which will be described at greater 
length hereafter had thrown the government of the city into the 
hands of the lower citizens. The " communes," as the new city 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHABTEB. 



179 



governments were called, showed an enthusiastic devotion to 
Earl Simon and his cause. The Queen was stopped in her attempt 
to escape from the Tower by an angry mob, who drove her back 
with stones and foul words. When Henry attempted to surprise 
Leicester in his quarters in Southwark, the Londoners burst the 
gates which had been locked by the richer burghers against him, 
and rescued him by a welcome into the city. In spite of the 
taunts of the Royalists, who accused him of seeking allies against 
the nobility in the common people, the popular enthusiasm gave 
a strength to Earl Simon which enabled him to withstand the 
severest blow which had yet been dealt to his cause. In the Mise 
of Amiens, Lewis of France, who had accepted the task of arbitrat- 
ing between the contending parties, gave his verdict wholly in 
favor of the King. The Provisions of Oxford were annulled, the 
appointment and removal of the great officers of state was vested 
wholly in the Crovm, the aliens might be recalled at the royal 
will, the castles were to be surrendered into Henry's hands. The 
blow was a hard one, and the decision of Lewis was backed by 
the excommunications of Rome. Luckily, the French award had 
reserved the rights of Englishmen to the liberties they had enjoy- 
ed before the Provisions of Oxford, and it was easy for Earl Simon 
to prove that the arbitrary power it gave to the Crown was as 
contrary to the Charter as to the Provisions themselves. London 
was the first to reject the decision; its citizens mustered at the 
call of the town-bell at Saint Paul's, seized the royal officials, and 
plundered the royal parks. But the royal army had already mus- 
tered in great force at the King's summons, and Leicester found 
himself deserted by baron after baron. Every day brought news 
of ill. A detachment from Scotland joined Henry's forces, the 
younger De Montfort was taken prisoner in a sally, Northamjjton 
was captured, the King raised the siege of Rochester, and a rapid 
march of Earl Simon's only saved London itself from a surprise by 
Edward. Betrayed as he Avas, the Earl remained firm to his oath. 
He would fight to the end, he said, even were he and his sons left 
to fight alone. With an army reinfoi'ced by 15,000 Londoners, he 
marched to the relief of the Cinque Ports, which were now threat- 
ened by the King. Even on the march he was forsaken by many 
of tlie nobles who followed him. Halting at Flexing in Sussex, a 
few miles from Lewes, where the royal army was encamped. Earl 
Simon with the young Earl of Gloucester oflered the King com- 
pensation for all damage if he would observe the Provisions. 
Henry's answer Avas one of defiance, and though numbers were 
against him the Earl resolved on battle. His skill as a soldier re- 
versed the advantages of the ground; marching at dawn, he seized 
the heights above the town, and forced the royal army to an at- 
tack. His men, with white crosses on back and breast, knelt in 
prayer while the royal forces advarjced. Edward was the first to 
open the fight; his furious charge broke the Londoners on Leices- 
ter's left, and in the bitterness of his hatred he pursued them for 
four miles, slaughtering three thousand men. He returned to find 



180 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the battle lost. Crowded in the narrow space, with a river in their 
rear, the Royalist centre and left were crushed by Earl Simon ; the 
Earl of Cornwall, now King of the Romans, who, as the mocking 
song of the victors ran, " makede him a castel of a mulne post" 
(" he weened that the mill-sails were mangonels" goes on the sar- 
castic verse), was made prisonei*, and Henry himself captured. 
Edward cut his way into the Priory only to join in his father's 
surrender. 

, The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state. 
" Now England breathes in the hope of liberty," sang a poet of 
the time; "the English were despised like dogs, but now they 
have lifted up their head and their foes are vanquished." The 
song announces with almost legal precision the theory of the pa- 
triots. "He who would be in truth a king, he is a 'free king' in- 
deed if he rightly rule himself and his realm. All things are law- 
ful to him for the government of his kingdom, but nothing for its 
destruction. It is one thing to rule according to a king's duty, 
another to destroy a kingdom by resisting the law." "Let the 
community of the realm advise, and let it be known what the gen- 
erality, to whom their own laws are best known, think on the mat- 
ter. They who are ruled by the laws know those laws best, they 
who make daily trial of them are best acquainted with them; and 
since it is their own affairs which are at stake, they will take more 
care, and will act with an eye to their own peace." "It concerns 
the community to see what sort of men ought justly to be chosen 
for the weal of the realm." The constitutional restrictions on the 
royal authority, the right of the whole nation to deliberate and 
decide on its own affairs, and to have a voice in the selection of 
the administrators of government, had never been so clearly stated 
before. That these were the principles of the man in whose hands 
victory had placed the realm is plain from the steps he immediate- 
ly took. By the scheme devised in a Parliament which immedi- 
ately followed the battle of Lewes, the supreme power was to re- 
side in the King, assisted by a council nominated by the Earls of 
Leicester and Gloucester and the patriotic Bishop of Chichester. 
Ill December a new Parliament was summoned to Westminster; 
but the weakness of the patriotic party among the baronage was 
shown in the fact that only twenty-three earls and barons could 
be found to sit beside the hundred and twenty ecclesiastics. It 
was probably the sense of his weakness that forced Earl Simon to 
fling himself on the towns, and to summon two citizens from every 
borough. The attendance of delegates from the towns had long- 
been usual in the county courts when any matter respecting their 
interests was in question; but it was the writ issued by Earl Simon 
that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit beside the 
knight of the shire, the bai'on, and the bishop in the Parliament of 
the realm. The importance of the step is best realized when we 
remember the new democratic spirit which through the victory 
of the ''commune" over the wealthier burgher class was now tri- 
umphant in the towns. But it is only this great event which 



III.] 



TEE GREAT CHABTEE. 



181 



enables us to understand the large and prescient nature of Earl 
Simon's designs. Hardly a few months had passed since the vic- 
tory of Lewes, and already, when the burghers took their seats at 
Westminster, his government was tottering to its fall. Dangers 
from without the Earl had met with complete success ; a general 
muster of the national forces on Barhara Down had put an end to 
the projects of invasion entertained by the mercenaries whom the 
Queen had collected in Flanders ; the threats of France had died 
away into negotiations ; the Papal Legate had been forbidden to 
cross the Channel, and his bulls of excommunication had been 
flung into the sea. But the difficulties at home grew more formida- 
ble every day. The restraint put upon Henry and Edward jarred 
against the national feeling of loyalty, and estranged the great 
masses who always side with the weak. Small as the patriotic 
party among the barons had always been, it grew smaller as dis- 
sensions broke out over the spoils of victory. The Earl's justice 
and resolve to secure the public peace told heavily against him, 
John Giffard left him because he refused to allow him to exact 
ransom from a prisoner contrary to the agreement made after 
Lewes. The Earl of Gloucester, though enriched with the estates 
of the foreignei's, resented Leicester's prohibition 5f a tournament, 
his naming the wardens of the royal castles by his own authority, 
and his holding Edward's fortresses on the Welsh Marches by his 
own garrisons. Gloucester's later conduct proves the wisdom of 
Leicester's precautions. He was already in correspondence with 
the royal party, and on the escape of Edward from confinement 
he joined him with the whole of his forces. The moment was a 
luckless one for Earl Simon, who had advanced along bad roads 
into South Wales to attack the fortresses of his rebel colleague. 
Marching rapidly along the Severn, Edward took Gloucester, de- 
stroyed the ships by, which Leicester hoped to escape to Bristol, 
and cut him off altogether from England ; then turning rajDidly to 
the east, he surprised the younger Simon de Montfort, who was 
advancing to his father's relief, at Kenilworth, and cut his whole 
force to pieces. From the field of battle he again turned to meet 
Earl Simon himself, who had thrown his troops in boats across the 
Severn, and was hurrying to the junction with his son. Exhaust- 
ed by a night march on Evesham, the Earl learned the approach 
of the royal forces, and pushing his army to the front, rode to a 
hill to reconnoitre. His eye at once recognized in the orderly ad- 
vance of his enemies the proof of his own experienced training. 
"By the arm of St. James," he cried, " they come on in wise fash- 
ion, but it was from me that they learned it." A glance satisfied 
him of the hopelessness of the struggle. " Let us commend our 
souls to God," he said to the little group around him, " for our 
bodies are the foe's." It was impossible, indeed, for a handful of 
horsemen with a host of half-armed Welshmen to resist the dis- 
ciplined knighthood of the royal army. The Earl, therefore, bade 
Hugh Despencer and the rest of his comrades to fly from the field. 
"If he died," was the noble answer, " they had no will to live." 



182 



SISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. VII. 

Tub Babonb' 
Wae. 

1258- 
1265. 

Battle of 

Kvesham, 

Aug. 3, 12(55. 



In two hours the butchery was over. The Welsh fled at the first 
onset like sheep, and were cut ruthlessly down in the corn-fields 
and gardens where they sought refuge. The group around Simon 
fought desperately, falling one by one till the Earl was left alone. 
A lance-thrust brought his horse to the ground, but Simon still 
rejected the summons to yield, till a blow from behind felled him, 
mortally wounded, to the ground, and w'ith a last cry of "It is 
God's grace" the soul of the great patriot passed away. 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWABDS. 



183 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE THREE EDWARDS. 

1265—1360. 

Section I.— The Conquest of Wales. 1265—1284. 

[Authorities. — For the general state of Wales, see the " Itinerariura Cambri£e"of 
Giraldus Cambrensis: for its general history, the " Brut-y-Tywy-sogion, " and "An- 
nales Cambrise," published by the Master of the Rolls ; the Chronicle of Caradoc of 
Lancarvan, as given in the translation by Powel; and Warrington'? "History of 
Wales." Stephen's "Literature of the Cymry" affords a general view of Welsh po- 
etry: the "Mabinogion" have been published by Lady Charlotte Guest. In his es- 
says on "The Study of Celtic Literature," Mr. Matthew Arnold has admirably il- 
lustrated the characteristics of the Welsh poetry. For English affairs we may add 
to tlie authorities used in the last chapter, the jejune Chronicles of Trivet and the 
later History of Hcmingford.] 



While literature find science after a brief outburst were crush- 
ed in England by the turmoil of the Barons' War, a poetic revival 
had brought into sharp contrast the social and intellectual condi- 
tion of Wales. 

To all outer seeming Wales had in the thirteenth century be- 
come utterly barbarous. Stripped of every vestige of the older 
Koman civilization by ages of bitter warfare, of civil strife, of es- 
trangement from the general culture of Christendom, the uncon- 
quered Britons had sunk into a mass of savage herdsmen, clad in 
the skins and fed by the milk of the cattle they tended, faithless, 
greedy, and revengeful, retaining no higher political organization 
than that of the clan, broken by ruthless feuds, united only in bat- 
tle or in raid against the stranger. But in the heart of the wild 
people there still lingered a spark of the poetic fire which had 
nerved it four hundred years before, through Aneurin and Lly- 
warch Hen, to its struggle with tlie Saxon. At the hour of its 
lowest degradation the silence of Wales was suddenly broken by 
a crowd of singers. The new poetry of the twelfth century burst 
forth, not from one bard or another, but from the jiation at large. 
"In every house," says a shrewd English observer of the time, 
"strangers who arrived in the morning were entertained till even- 
tide Avith the talk of maidens and the music of the harp." The 
new enthusiasm of the race found an admirable means of utter- 
ance in its tongue, as real a development of the old Celtic lan- 
guage heard by Cgesar as the Romance tongues are developments 
of Caesar's Latin, but which at a far earlier date than any other 
language of modern Europe had attained to definite structure and 
to settled literary form, ISTo other medieval literature shows at its 



184 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



outset the same elaborate and completed organization as that of 
the Welsh, but within these settled forms the Celtic fancy plays 
with a startling freedom. In one of the later poems Gwion the 
Little transforms himself into a hare, a fish, a bird, a grain of 
wheat; but he- is only the symbol of the strange shapes in which 
the Celtic fancy embodies itself in the tales of Mabinogi which 
reached their highest perfection in the legends of Arthur. Its 
gay extravagance flings defiance to all fact, tradition, probability, 
and revels in the impossible and unreal. When Arthur sails into 
the unknown Avorld, it is in a ship of glass. The " descent into 
hell," as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes off the mediaeval horror 
with the mediaeval reverence, and the knight who achieves the 
quest spends his years of infernal durance in hunting and min- 
strelsy, and in converse with fair women. The world of the Ma- 
binogi is a world of pure phantasy, a new earth of marvels and en- 
chantments, of dark forests whose silence is broken by the her- 
mit's bell, and sunny glades where the light plays on tlie hero's 
armor. Each figure as it moves across the poet's canvas is bright 
with glancing color. " The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame- 
colored silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in 
which were precious emeralds and rubies. Her head was of 
brighter gold than the flower of the broom, her skin Avas whiter 
than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fin- 
gers than the blossoms of the wood-anemone amid the spray of 
the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance 
of the falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more 
snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder 
than the reddest roses." Every where thei'e is an Oriental profu- 
sion of gorgeous imagery, but the gorgeousness is seldom oppress- 
ive. The sensibility of the Celtic temper, so quick to perceive 
beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, its emotions, its adventures, 
its sorrows, its joys, is tempered by a passionate melancholy that 
expresses its revolt against the impossible, by an instinct of what 
is noble, by a sentiment that discovers the weird charm of nature. 
Some graceful play of pure fancy, some tender note of feeling, 
some magical touch of beauty, relieves its worst extravagance. 
Kalweh's greyhounds, as they bound from side to side of tlieir 
master's steed, " sport round him like two sea- swallows." His 
spear is "swifter than the fall of the dew-drop from the blade of 
reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of June is at the heavi- 
est," A subtle, observant love of nature and natural beauty takes 
fresh color fror^ the passionate human sentiment with which it is 
imbued, sentiment which breaks out in Gwalchmai's cry of nature- 
love, " I love the birds and their sweet voices in the lulling songs 
of the wood," in his watches at night beside the fords " among 
the untrodden grass" to hear the nightingale and watch the play 
of the sea-mew. Even pati'iotism takes the same picturesque 
form ; the poet hates the flat and sluggish land of the Saxon ; as 
he loves his own, he tells of "its sea-coast and. its mountains, its 
towns on the forest border, its fair landscape, its dales, its waters, 
and its valleySj its white sea-mews, its beauteous women." But 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



185 



tlie song passes swiftly and subtly into a world of romantic sen- 
timent : " I love its fields clothed with tender trefoil, I love the 
marches of Merioneth where my head was pillowed on a snow- 
white arm." In the Celtic love of w^oman there is little of the 
Teutonic depth and earnestness, but in its stead a child-like spirit 
of delicate enjoyment, a faint distant flush of passion like the rose- 
light of dawn on a snowy mountain peak, a playful delight in 
beauty. " White is my love as the apple-blossom, as the ocean's 
spray ; her face shines like the pearly dew on Eryri ; the glow of 
her cheeks is like the light of sunset." But the buoyant and elas- 
tic temper of the French trouveur is spiritualized in the Welsh 
singers by a more refined poetic feeling, " Whoso beheld her was 
filled with her love. Four white trefoils sprang up wherever she 
trod," The touch of pure fancy removes its object out of the 
sphere of passion into one of delight and reverence. 

It is strange, as we have said, to pass from the w^orld of actual 
Welsh history into such a world as this. But side by side with 
this wayward, fanciful stream of poesy and romance ran a torrent 
of intenser song. The old spirit of the earlier bards, their joy in 
battle, their love for freedom, their hatred of the Saxon, broke out 
in ode after ode, turgid, extravagant, monotonous, often prosaic, 
but fused into poetry by the intense fire of patriotism which glow- 
ed within it. The rise of the new poetic feeling indeed marked 
the appearance of a new energy in the long struggle with the En- 
glish conqueror. 

Of the three Welsh states into which all that remained uncon- 
quered of Britain had been broken by the victoi-ies of Deorham 
and Chester, two had already ceased to exist. The country be- 
tween the Clyde and the Dee, which soon became parted into the 
kingdoms of Cumbria and Strathclyde, had been gradually absorb- 
ed by the conquest of Northumbria. West Wales, between the 
British Channel and the estuary of the Severn, had yielded at last 
to the sword of -^thelstan. But a fiercer resistance prolonged the 
independence of the great central portion which alone in modern 
language preserves the name of Wales, In itself the largest and 
most powerful of the British kingdoms, it was aided in its struggle 
against Mercia by the weakness of its assailant, the youngest and 
least powerful of the English states, as well as by the internal 
warfare which distracted the energies of the invadei'S. But Mer- 
cia had no sooner risen to supremacy among the English king- 
doms, than it took the conquest vigorously in hand, Ofia tore 
from Wales the border-land between the Severn and the Wye; 
the raids of his successors carried fire and sword into the heart of 
the country; and an acknowledgment of the Mercian overlordship 
Was wrested from the Welsh princes. On the fall of Mercia this 
passed to the West-Saxon kings. The Laws of Howel Dhu own 
the payment of a yearly tribute by " the prince of Aberfrau" to 
"the king of London," and three Welsh chieftains were among the 
subject feudatories who rowed Eadgar on the Dee. The weakness 
of England during her long struggle with the Danes revived the 
hopes of British independence, and in the midst of the Confessor's 



186 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



reign the Welsh seized on a quarrel between the houses of Leofric 
and Godwine to cross the border and carry their attacks into En- 
gland itself. The victories of Harold, however, re-asserted the En- 
glish supremacy ; his light-armed troops disembarking on the coast 
penetrated to the heart of the mountains, and the successors of the 
Welsh prince Gruflydd, whose head was the trophy of the cam- 
paign, swore to observe the old fealty and render the old tribute 
to the English Crown. 

Afar more desperate struggle began when the wave of Norman 
conquest broke on the Welsh frontier. A chain of great earldoms, 
settled by William along the border-land, at once bridled the old 
marauding forays. From his county palatine of Chester, Hugh the 
Wolf harried Flintshire into a desei-t ; Robert of Belesme, in his 
earldom of Shrewsbury, " slew the Welsh," says a chronicler," like 
sheep, conquered them, enslaved them, and flayed them with nails 
of iron." Backed by these greater baronies, a horde of lesser 
adventurers obtained the royal "license to make conquest on the 
Welsh." Monmouth and Abergavenny were seized and guarded 
by Norman castellans; Bernard of Neufmarche won the lordship 
of Brecknock ; Roger of Montgomery raised the town and fortress 
in Powysland which still preserves his name. 

A great rising of the whole people at last recovered some of this 
Norman spoil. The new castle of Montgomery was burned, Breck- 
nock and Cardigan were cleared of the invaders, and tlie Welsh^ 
poured ravaging over the English border. Twice the Red King- 
carried his arms fruitlessly among the mountains, against enemies 
who took refuge in their fastnesses till famine and hardship had 
driven his broken host into retreat. The wiser policy of Henry 
the First fell back on his father's system of gradual conquest, and 
a new tide of invasion flowed along the coast, where the land was 
level and open and accessible from the sea. Robert Fitz-Hamo, 
the lord of Hereford, had already been summoned to his aid by a 
Welsh chieftain ; and by the defeat of Rhys ap Tewdor, the last 
prince under whom Southern Wales Avas united, had produced an 
anarchy which enabled him to land safely on the coast, to sweep 
the Welsh from Glamorgan, and divide it between his soldiery. 
A force of Flammands and Englishmen followed Richard Strong- 
bow as he landed near Milford Haven, and pushing back the in- 
habitants settled a "Little England" in the present Pembroke- 
shire. Traces of the Flemish speech still linger perhaps in the 
peninsula of Gower, where a colony of mercenaries from Flanders 
settled themselves at a somewhat later time, while a few daring 
adventurers followed the Lord of Keymes into Cardiganshire, where 
land might be had for the asking by any who would " wage Avar 
upon the Welsh." 

It was at this moment, when the utter subjugation of the Brit- 
ish race seemed close at hand, that the new poetic fire rolled back 
the tide of invasion, and changed these fitful outbreaks of Welsh 
resistance into a resolute effort to regain national independence. 
Every fight, every hero, had suddenly its verse. The names of 
the older bards were revived in bold forgeries to animate the na- 



IV.] 



TJSE THREE EDWARDS. 



187 



tional resistance and to prophesy victory. It was in North Wales 
that the new spirit of patriotism received its strongest inspiration 
from this burst of song. Again and again Henry the Second was 
driven to retreat froni^the impregnable fastnesses where the 
"Lords of Snowdon," the princes of the house of Gruffydd ab Co- 
nan, claimed supremacy over Wales. Once a cry arose that the 
King was slain, Henry of Essex flung down the royal standard, 
and the King's desperate efforts could hardly save his army from 
utter rout. In a later campaign the invaders were met by storms. 
of rain, and forced to abandon their baggage in a headlong flight 
to Chester. The greatest of the Welsh odes, that known to En- 
glish readers in Gray's translation as "The Triumph of Owen," is 
Gwalchmai's song of victory over the repulse of an English fleet 
from Abermenai. The long reigns of the two Llewellyns, the sons 
of Jorwerth and of Gruffydd, which all but cover the last century 
of Welsh independence, seemed destined to realize the hopes of 
their countrymen. The homage which the first succeeded in ex- 
torting from the whole of the Welsh chieftains placed him openly 
at the head of his race, and gave a new character to his struggle 
with the English King. In consolidating his authority within his 
own domains, and in the assertion of his lordship over the princes 
of the south, Llewellyn ap Jorwerth aimed steadily at securing the 
means of striking off the yoke of the Saxon. It was in vain that 
John strove to buy his friendship by the hand of his daughter 
Johanna. Fresh raids on the Marches forced the King to enter 
Wales ; but though his army reached Snowdon, it fell back like 
its predecessors, starved and broken before an enemy it could 
never reach. A second attack had better success. The chieftains 
of South Wales were drawn from their new allegiance to join the 
English forces, and Llewellyn, prisoned in his fastnesses, was at 
last driven to submit. But the ink of the treaty was hardly dry 
before Wales was again on fire ; the common fear of the English 
once more united its chieftains, and the war between John and 
liis barons removed all dread of a new invasion. Absolved from 
his allegiance to an excommunicated king, and allied with the 
barons under Fitz- Walter — too glad to enlist in their cause a 
prince who could hold in check the nobles of the border country, 
where the royalist cause was strongest — Llewellyn seized his op- 
portunity to reduce Shrewsbury, to annex Powys, where the En- 
glish influence had always been powerful, to clear the royal gar- 
risons from Caermarthen and Cardiganshire, and to force even the 
Flemings of Pembroke to do him homage. 

The hopes of Wales rose higher and higher with each triumph 
of the Loi'd of Snowdon. The court of Llewellyn was crowded 
with bardic singers. "He pours," sings one of them, "his gold 
into the lap of the bard as the ripe fruit falls from the trees." 
But gold was hardly needed to wake their enthusiasm. Poet aft- 
er poet sang of " the Devastator of England," the " Eagle of men 
that loves not to lie nor sleep," " towering above the rest of men 
with his long red lance," his "red helmet of battle crested with a 
fierce wolf," "the sound of his coming is like the roar of the 



lile-wellyn 

ap Jor- 
werth and 
tlie Ibardst 



188 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



wave as it rushes to the shore, that can neither be stayed nor ap- 
peased." Lesser bards strung together his victories in rough jin- 
gle of rhyme, and hounded him on to the slaughter. " Be of good 
courage in the slaughter," sings Elidii-f" cling to thy work, de- 
stroy England, and plunder its multitudes." A fiei'ce thirst for 
blood runs through the abrupt, passionate verses of the court 
singers. "Swansea, that tranquil town, was broken in heaps," 
bursts out a triumphant poet ; " St. Clears, with its bright white 
lands, it is not Saxons who hold it now !" " In Swansea, the key 
of Lloegria, we made widows of all the wives." " The dread Eagle 
is wont to lay corpses in rows, and to feast with the leader of 
wolves and with hovering ravens glutted with flesh, butchers with 
keen scent of carcasses." " Better," closes the song, " is the grave 
than the life of man who sighs when the horns call him forth to 
the squares of battle." But even in bardic verse Llewellyn rises 
high out of the mere mob of chieftains who live by rapine, and 
boast as the Hirlas-horn passes from hand to hand through the 
hall that "they take and give no quarter." "Tender-hearted, 
wise, witty, ingenious," he was " the great Caesar" who was to 
gather beneath his sway the broken fragments of the Celtic race. 
Mysterious prophecies floated from lip to lip, till the name of Mer- 
lin was heard along the Seine and the Rhine. Medrawd and Ar- 
thur would appear once more on earth to fight over again the 
fatal battle of Camlan. The last conqueror of the Celtic nace, 
Cadwallon, still lived to combat for his people. The supposed 
verses of Taliesin expressed the undying hope of a restoration of 
the Cymry. "Li their hands shall be all the land from Brittany 
to Man: ... a rumor shall arise that the Germans are moving out 
of Britain back again to their fatherland." Gathered up in the 
strange work of Geofl'ry of Monmouth, these predictions made a 
deep impression, nat on Wales only, but on its conquerors. It 
was to meet indeed the dreams of a yet living Arthur that the 
grave of the legendary hero-king at Glastonbury was found and 
visited by Henry the Second. But neither trick nor conquest 
could shake the firm faith of the Celt in the ultimate victory of 
his race. " Think you," said Henry to a Welsh chieftain who had 
joined his host, " that your people of rebels can withstand my 
army ?" " My people," replied the chieftain, " may be weakened 
by your might, and even in great part destroyed, but unless the 
wrath of God be on the side of its foe it will not perish utterly. 
Nor deem I that other race or other tongue will answer for this 
corner of the world before the Judge of all at the last day save 
this people and tongue of Wales." So ran the popular rhythm, 
" Their Lord they will praise, their speech they shall keep, their 
land they shall lose — except wild Wales." Faith and prophecy 
seemed justified by the growing strength of the British people. 
The weakness and dissensions which characterized the reign of 
Henry the Third enabled Llewellyn ap Jorwerth to preserve a 
practical independence till the close of his life, when, a fresh ac- 
knowledgment of the English supremacy was wrested from him 
by Archbishop Edmund. But the triumphs of his arras were re- 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWAEDS. 



189 



newed by Llewellyn the son of Gruffydd, whose ravages swept the 
border to the very gates of Chester, while his fleet intercepted and 
routed the reinforcements Avhich the English were drawing from 
Ireland. His conquest of Glamorgan roused the Welsh chieftains 
to swear eternal enmity against the English race, and throughout 
the Barons' war Llewellyn remained master of Wales. Even at 
its close the threat of an attack from the now united kingdom 
only forced him to submission on a practical acknowledgment 
of his sovereignty. The chieftain whom the English kings had 
till then scrupulously designated as "Lord of Snowdon," was now 
allowed the title of " Prince of Wales," and his right to receive 
homage from the other nobles of his jirincipality was formally al- 
lowed. 

Near, however, as Llewellyn seemed to the final realization of 
his aims, he was still a vassal of the English crown, and the ac- 
cession of a new sovereign to the throne was at once followed by 
the demand of his homage. The youth of Edward the First had 
given little promise of the high qualities which distinguished him 
as an English ruler. In his earlier manhood he had Avon general 
ill-will by the turbulence and disorder of his knightly train ; his 
intrigues in the earlier part of the Barons' war had aroused the 
suspicions of the King ; his faithlessness in the later time had 
brought about the fatal conflict between the Crown and Earl 
Simon which ended in the Earl's terrible overthrow. London re- 
membered bitterly his ruthless butchery of her citizens at Lewes, 
and the reckless pillage at the- close of the war with w^hich he had 
avenged an insult offered to his mother. But with the victory of 
Evesham his character seemed to mould itself into nobler form. 
It was from Earl Simon, as the Earl owned with a proud bitter- 
ness ere his death, that Edward had learned the skill in warfare 
which distinguished him among the princes of his time. But he 
had learned from the Earl the far nobler lesson of a self-govern- 
ment which lifted him high above them as a ruler among men. 
Severing himself from the brutal triumph of the royalist party, he 
secured fair terms to the conquered, and after crushing the last 
traces of resistance, cleared the realm of the disorderly bands 
which the cessation of the war had let loose on the country by 
leading them to a crusade in Palestine. His father's death recall- 
ed him home to meet at once the difficulty of Wales. During two 
years Llewellyn rejected the King's repeated summons to him to 
perform his homage, till Edward's patience was exhausted, and 
the royal army marched into North Wales. The fabric of Welsh 
greatness fell at a single blow ; the chieftains of the South and 
centre who had so lately sworn fealty to Llewellyn deserted him 
to join his English enemies ; a fleet from the Cinque Ports reduced 
Anglesea, and the chief of Snowdon, cooped up in his fastnesses, was 
forced to throw himself on the royal mercy. With characteristic 
generosity, his conqueror contented himself with adding to the En- 
glish dominions the country as far as Conway, and providing that 
the title of Prince of Wales should cease at Llewellyn's death. A 
heavy fine which he had incurred was remitted, and Eleanor, the 



Seo. I. 

TSB 

Conquest of 
Wales. 
1265- 
1284. 



12C8. 



1270. 



12TT. 



190 



HIBTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



datighter of Simon of Montfort, who had been arrested on her way 
to join him as his wife, was wedded to him at the English court. 
For four years all was quiet, but a sudden outbreak of his broth- 
er David, who had deserved him in the previous war, and whose 
desertion had been rewarded with an English earldom, roused 
LleAvellyn to a renewal of the struggle. A prophecy of Merlin 
had announced that when English money became round the Prince 
of Wales should be crowned at London, and a new coinage of cop- 
per money, coupled with the prohibition to break the silver penny 
into halves and quarters, as had been usual, was supposed to have 
fulfilled the prediction. In the campaign which followed the 
Prince held out in Snowdon with the stubbornness of despair, and 
the rout of an English detachment which had thrown a bridge 
across the Menai Straits from Anglesea prolonged the contest into 
the winter. Terrible, however, as were the sufferings of the En- 
glish army, Edward's firmness remained unbroken, and rejecting 
all proposals of reti'eat he issued orders for the formation of a 
new army at Caermarthen to complete the circle of investment. 
The danger drew Llewellyn into Radnorshire, and the last Prince 
of Wales fell, unrecognized, in a petty skirmish on the banks of 
the Wye. With him expired the independence of his race. After 
six months of flight his brother David was arrested, and sentenced 
by the Parliament to a traitor's death. The submission of the less- 
er chieftains was followed by the building of strong castles at Con- 
way and Caernarvon, and the settlement of English barons on the 
confiscated soil. A wiser instinct of government led Edward to 
establish trade-guilds in the towns, to introduce the English juris- 
prudence, to divide the country into shires and hundreds on the 
English model, and to abolish by the " Statute of Wales" the more 
barbarous of the Welsh customs. His policy of justice and con- 
ciliation (for the alleged " massacre of the bards" is a mere fable) 
accomplished its end, and with the exception of a single rising in 
Edward's reign the peace of Wales remained unbroken for a hun- 
dred years. 

Section II.— The EngUsh Parliament. 1283—1295. 

[^Authorities.— The short treatise on the Constitution of Parliament called "Mo- 
dus tenendi Parliamenti" may be taken as a fair account of its actual state and pow- 
ers in the fourteenth century. It has been reprinted by Professor Stubbs, in the 
invaluable collection of Documents which serves as the base of the present section. 
Sir Francis Palgrave has illustrated the remedial side of our parliamentary institu- 
tions with much vigor and picturesqueness in his "History of the English Common- 
wealth," but his conclusions are often hasty and prejudiced. On all constitutional 
points from the reign of Edward the First we can now rely on the judgment and re- 
search of Mr. Hallam ("Middle Ages").] 



The conquest of Wales marked the adoption of a new attitude 
and policy on the part of the Crown. From the earliest moment 
of his reign Edward the First definitely abandoned all dreams of 
recovering the foreign dominions of his race, to concentrate him- 
self on the consolidation and good government of Britain itself. 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



191 



We can only fairly judge Lis annexation of Wales, or his attempt 
to annex Scotland, if we regard them as parts of the same scheme 
of national administration to which we owe his final establishment 
of our judicature, our legislation, our Parliament. The King's En- 
glish policy, like his English name, is the sign of a new epoch. 
The long period of national formation has come practically to an 
end. With the reign of Edward begins modern England — the 
England in which we live. It is not that any chasm separates 
our history before it from our history after it, as the chasm of the 
Revolution divides the history of France, for we have traced the 
rudiments of our constitution to the first moment of the English 
settlement in Britain. But it is with these as with our language. 
The tongue of jElfred is the very tongue we speak ; but in spite 
of its actual identity with modern English it has to be learned 
like the tongue of a stranger. On the other hand,, the English of 
Chaucer is almost as intelligible as our own. In the first the histo- 
rian and philologer can study the origin and development of our 
national speech ; in the last a school-boy can enjoy the story of 
"Troilus and Cresside,"or listen to the gay chit-chat ofthe" Can- 
terbury Tales." In precisely the same way the laws of -^Ethelstan 
or Stephen are indispensable for the right understanding of later 
legislation, its origin and its development, while the principles of 
our Parliamentary system must necessarily be studied in the meet- 
ings of Wise Men before the Conquest, or barons after it. But the 
Parliaments which Edward gathered at the close of his reign are 
not merely illustrative of the history of later Parliaments, they are 
absolutely identical with those which still sit at St. Stephen's ; and 
a statute ofEdward, if unrepealed, can be pleaded in our courts as 
formally as a statute of Victoria. In a word, the long struggle of 
the constitution for actual existence had come to an end. The con- 
tests which follow are not contests which tell, like those which pre- 
ceded them, on the actuaf fabric of our political institutions; they 
are simply stages in the rough discipline by which England has 
learned, and is still learning, how best to use and how wisely to 
develop the latent powers of its national life, how to adjust the 
balance of its social and political forces, and to adapt its consti- 
tutional forms to the varying conditions of the time. From the 
reign of Edward, in fact, we are face to face with modern England. 
Kings, Lords, Commons, the courts of justice, the forms of public 
administration, our local divisions and provincial jurisdictions, the 
relations of Church and State, in great measure the frame-work of 
society itself, have all taken the shape which they still essentially 
retain. 

Much of this great change is doubtless attributable to the gen- 
eral temper of the age, whose special task and object seemed to be 
those of reducing to distinct form the great principles which had 
sprung into a new and vigorous life during the century that pre- 
ceded it. As the thirteenth century had been an age of founders, 
creators, discoverers, so its successor was an age of lawyers ; the 
most illustrious men of the time were no longer such as Bacon, or 
Earl Simon, or Francis of Assisi,but men such as St. Lewis of France 



192 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



or Alfonso the Wise, organizers, administrators, fraraers of laws and 
institutions. It was to this class that Edward himself belonged. 
There is no trace of creative genius or originality in his character, 
but he possessed in a high degree the faculty of organization, and 
his passionate love of law broke out even in the legal chicanery 
to which he sometimes stooped. In the judicial reforms to which 
the earlier part of his reign was devoted we see, if not an " En- 
glish Justinian," at any rate a clear-sighted man of business, de- 
veloping, reforming, bringing into distinct shape the institutions 
of his predecessors. His first step was to define the provinces 
of the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, by restricting the 
bishops' courts, or courts Christian, to the cognizance of pure- 
ly spiritual causes, and of causes like those of perjury, marriage, 
and testamentary dispositions, which were regarded as of a semi- 
spiritual nature. The most important court of civil jurisdiction, 
the Sherifi's' or County Court, .remained unchanged, both in the 
extent of its jurisdiction, and the character of the Sherifi'as a roy- 
al officer. But a change which told greatly on its powers sprang 
almost accidentally from the operation of a statute (that of Win- 
chester) which provided for the peace of the realm. To enforce 
the observance of this act knights were appointed in every shire 
under the name of Conservators of the Peace, a name which, as 
the convenience of these local magistrates was more sensibly felt 
and their powers more largely extended, was changed for that 
which they still retain, of "Justices of the Peace." The superior 
courts into which the King's Court had, since the great Charter, 
divided itself — those of the King's Bench, Exchequer, and Com- 
mon Pleas — assumed their present form partly by each receiving 
a distinct staff of judges, partly by the extinction of the office of 
the Justiciar, who had till then given them a seeming unity by 
acting as president in all. Of far gi-eater importance than these 
changes, which were in fact but the completion of reforms begun 
long before, was the establishment of an equitable jurisdiction side 
by side with that of the common law. In his reform of 1178 Henry 
the Second had broken up the older King's Court, which had till 
then served as the final Court of Appeal, by the severance of the 
purely legal judges who had been gradually added to it from the 
general body of his councilors. The judges thus severed from the 
Council retained the name and the ordinary jurisdiction of " the 
King's Court," while all cases in which they failed to do justice 
were reserved for the special cognizance of the Council itself. To 
this new final jurisdiction of the King in Council, Edward gave a 
wide development ; his assembly of the ministeis, the higher per- 
manent officials, and the law officers of the Crown, reserved to it- 
self in its judicial capacity the correction of all breaches of the 
law which the lower courts had failed to repress, whether from 
weakness, partiality, or corruption, and especially of those lawless 
outbreaks of the more powerful baronage which defied the com- 
mon authority of the judges. Though regarded with jealousy 
by Parliament, the jurisdiction of the Council seems to have been 
steadily exercised through the two centuries which followed ; in 



IV.] 



THE THESE EDWARDS. 



193 



the reigu of Henry the Seventh it took legal and statutory form 
in the new shape of the Court of Star-Chamber, and its powers 
are still exercised in our own days by the Judicial Committee of 
the Privy Council. But at a far earlier date its jurisdiction as a 
Court of Appeal had given birth to that of the Chancellor. The 
separate powers of this great officer of state, who had originally 
acted only as President of the Council when discharging its judi- 
cial functions, seems to have been thoroughly established under 
Edward the First, and considerably extended during the reign 
of his successor. It is by remembering the origin of the Court of 
Chancery that we understand the nature of the powers it gradual- 
ly acquired. All grievances of the subject, especially those which 
sprang from the misconduct of government officials or of power- 
ful oppressors, fell within its cognizance, as they had fallen within 
that of the Royal Council, and to these were added disputes re- 
specting the wardship of infants, dower, rent -charges, or tithes. 
Its equitable jui'isdiction sprang from the defective nature and 
tlie technical and unbending rules of the common law. As the 
Council had given redress in cases where law became injustice, so 
the Court of Chancery interfered without regard to the rules of 
procedure adopted by the common law courts, on the petition of 
a party for whose grievance the common law provided no ade- 
quate remedy. An analogous extension of his powers enabled 
the Chancellor to afford relief in cases of fraud, accident, or abuse 
of trust, and this side of his jurisdiction was largely extended at 
a later time through the results of legislation on the tenure of 
land by ecclesiastical bodies. 

In legislation, as in his judicial reforms, Edward did little more 
than renew and consolidate the principles which had been already 
brought into practical Avorking by Henry the Second. His Stat- 
ute of Winchester followed the precedent of the "Assize of Ai-ms" 
in basing the preservation of public order on the revival and de- 
velopment of the local system of frank-pledge. Every man was 
bound to hold himself in readiness, duly armed, for the King's 
service, or the hue and cry which pursued the felon. Every dis- 
trict was made responsible for crimes committed within its bounds; 
the gates of each town were required to be closed at night-fall, and 
all strangers to give an account of themselves to its magistrates. 
As a security for travelers against sudden attacks from robbers, 
all brush-wood was to be destroyed for a space of two hundred 
feet on either side the public highway, a provision which illus- 
trates at once the social and physical condition of the country at 
the time. The same care for the trading classes was seen in the 
Statute of Merchants, which provided for the registration of the 
debts of traders, and for their recovery by distraint of the debtor's 
goods and the imprisonment of his person. The Statute of Mort- 
main, Avhich prohibited the alienation of lands to the Church un- 
der pain of forfeiture, Avas based on the Constitutions of Claren- 
don, but it is difficult to see in it more than a jealousy of the 
rapid growth of ecclesiastical estates, which, grudged as it was 
by the baronage, Avas probably beneficial to the country at large, 

13 



194 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



as military service was rendered by Church fees as rigidly as by 
lay, while the churchmen were the better landlords. The stat- 
ute, however, was soon evaded by the ingenuity of lawyers, bat 
it probably checked a process which it could not wholly arrest. 
We trace the same conservative tendency, the same blind desire 
to keep things as they were during an age of rapid transition, in 
the great land-law which bears the technical name of the Statute 
"Quia Emptores." It is one of those legislative efforts which 
mark the progress of a wide social revolution in the country at 
large. The number of the greater barons was in fact diminishing 
every day, while the number of the country gentry and of the 
more substantial yeomanry was increasing with the increase of 
the national wealth. This increase showed itself in the growing 
desire to become proprietors of land. Tenants of the greater 
barons received under-tenants on condition of their rendering 
them similar services to those which they themselves rendered to 
their lords; and the baronage, while duly receiving the services 
in compensation for which they had originally granted their land 
in fee, saw with jealousy the feudal profits of these new under- 
tenants, the profits of wardship or of reliefs and the like, in a 
word the whole increase in the value of the estate consequent on 
its subdivision and higher cultivation, passing into other hands 
than their own. To check this growth of a squirearchy, as we 
should now term it, the statute provided that in any case of alien- 
ation the sub-tenant should henceforth hold, not of the tenant, but 
directly of the superior lord; but its result seems to have been to 
promote instead of hindering the subdivision of land. The tenant 
who was compelled before to retain in any case so much of the 
estate as enabled him to discharge his feudal services to the over- 
lord of whom he held it, was now enabled, by a process analogous 
to the sale of " tenant-right," to transfer both land and services to 
new holders. 

It is to the same social revolution rather than to any politic- 
al prescience of Edward the First, that we owe our Parliament. 
ISTeither the Meeting of the Wise Men before the Conquest, nor the 
Great Council of the Barons after it, had been in any way repre- 
sentative bodies. The first, which theoretically included all free 
holders of land, had shrunk at an early time — as we have seen — 
into a gathering of the earls, the higher nobles, and the bishops, 
with the ofiicers and thegns of the royal household. Little change 
was made in the comj)osition of this assembly by the Conquest, 
for the Great Council of the Norman kings was held to include all 
tenants who held directly of the Crown, the bishops and greater 
abbots (whose character as independent spiritual members tended 
more and more to merge in their position as barons), and the great 
officers of the Court. But though its composition remained the 
same, the character of the assembly was essentially altered. From 
a free gathering of " Wise Men" it sunk to a royal court of feudal 
vassals; but though its functions seem to have become almost 
nominal, and its powers to have been restricted to the sanctioning, 
without debate or possibility of refusal, all grants demanded from 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



185 



it by the Crown, its " counsel and consent" remained necessary 
for the legal validity of every great fiscal or political measure, and 
thus protested efiectually against the imperial theories advanced 
by the lawyers of Henry the Third, theories which declared all 
legislative power to reside wholly in the sovereign. It was in fact 
under Henry the Second that these assemblies became more regu- 
lar, and their functions more important. The great reforms which 
marked his reign were issued in the Great Council, and even finan- 
cial matters were suffered to be debated there. But it was not till 
the grant of the Great Charter that its powers over taxation were 
formally recognized, and the principle established that no burden 
beyond the customary feudal aids might be imposed " save by the 
Common Council of the Realm." The same great document first 
expressly regulated its form. In theory, as we have seen, the as- 
sembly consisted of all who held land directly of the Crown. But 
the same causes which restricted attendance at the Witenagemot 
to the greater nobles, told on the actual composition of the Coun- 
cil of Barons. While the attendance of the ordinary tenants in 
chief, the knights or "Lesser Barons," was burdensome from its 
expense to themselves, their numbei'S and their dependence on the 
higher nobles made it dangerous to the Crown. As early, there- 
fore, as the time of Henry the First we find a distinction recog- 
nized betAveen the " Greater Barons," of whom the Council was 
usually composed, and the " Lesser Barons," who formed the bulk 
of the tenants of the Crown ; but though the attendance of the 
latter had become rare, their right of attendance remained intact. 
While enacting that the prelates and greater barons should be 
summoned by special writs to each gathering of the Council, a re- 
markable provision of the Great Charter orders a general sum- 
mons to be issued through the sheriff to all direct tenants of the 
Crown, The provision was probably intended to rouse the lesser 
baronage to the exercise of rights which had practically passed 
into desuetude, but as the clause is omitted in later issues of the 
Charter we may doubt whether the principle it embodied ever re- 
ceived more than a very limited application. There ai'e traces of 
the attendance of a few of the lesser knighthood, gentry perhaps 
of the neighborhood where the Assembly was held, in some of its 
meetings under Henry the Third, but till a late period in the reign 
of his successor the Great Council practically remained a gathering 
of the greater barons, the prelates, and the ofiicers of the Crown. 
The change which the Great Charter had failed to accomplish 
was now, however, brought about by the social circumstances of 
the time. One of the most remarkable of these Avas the steady de- 
crease in the number of the greater nobles. The bulk of the earl- 
doms had already lapsed to the Crown thi-ough the extinction of 
the families of their possessors ; of the greater baronies, many had 
practically ceased to exist by their division among female co-heiress- 
es, many through the constant struggle of the poorer barons to rid 
themselves of their rank by a disclaimer, so as to escape the bui'den 
of higher taxation and attendance in Parliament which it involved. 
How far this diminution had gone we may see from the fact 



196 



SISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Seo. II. 



that hardly more than a hundred barons sat in the earlier coun- 
cils of Edward's reign. But while the number of those who act- 
ually possessed the privilege of assisting in Parliament was rapid- 
ly diminishing, the numbers and wealth of the " lesser baronage," 
whose right of attendance had become a mere constitutional tra- 
dition, was as rapidly increasing. The long peace and prosperity 
of the realm, the extension of its commerce, and the increased ex- 
port of wool, were swelling the ranks and incomes of the country 
gentry as well as of the freeholders and substantial yeomanry. 
We have already noticed the growing passion for the possession 
of land which makes this reign so critical a moment in the history 
of the English squirearchy ; but the same tendency had to some 
extent existed in the preceding century, and it was a conscious- 
ness of the growing importance of this class of rural proprietors 
which induced the barons to make their fruitless attempt to in- 
duce them to take part in the deliberations of the Great Council. 
But while the barons desired their presence as an aid against the 
Crown, the Crown itself desired it as a means of rendering taxa- 
tion more efficient. So long as the Great Council remained a 
mere assembly of magnates it was necessary for the King's minis- 
ters to treat separately with the other orders of the state as to 
the amount and assessment of their contributions. The grant 
made in the Great Council was binding only on the barons -and 
prelates who made it ; but before the aids of the boroughs, the 
Church, or the shires could reach the royal treasury, a separate 
negotiation had to be conducted by the officers of the Exchequer 
with the reeves of each town, the sheriff and shire-court of each 
county, and the archdeacons of each diocese. Bargains of this 
sort would be the more tedious and disaj^pointing as the necessi- 
ties of the Crown increased in the later years of Edward, and it 
became a matter of fiscal expediency to obtain the sanction of any 
proposed taxation through the presence of these classes in the 
Great Council itself. 

The effort, however, to revive the old personal attendance of 
the lesser baronage which had broken down half a century before, 
could hardly be renewed at a time when the increase of their 
numbers made it more impracticable than ever; but a means of 
escape from this difficulty was fortunately suggested by the very 
nature of the court through which alone a summons could be ad- 
dressed to the landed knighthood. Amid the many judicial re- 
forms of Henry or Edward the shire-court remained unchanged. 
The haunted mound or the immemorial oak round which the as- 
sembly gathered (for the court was often held in the open air) 
was the relic of a time before the free kingdom had sunk into a 
shire, and its meetings of the Wise into a county court. But 
save that the King's reeve had taken the place of the King, and 
that the Norman legislation had displaced the bishop and set four 
coroners by the sheriff's side, the gathering of the freeholders re- 
mained much as of old. The local knighthood, the yeomanry, the 
husbandmen of the county, were all represented in the crowd that 
gathered round the sheriff, as, guarded by his liveried followers, 



IV.] 



TRE THREE EDWABDS. 



be published the King's writs, announced his demand of aids, re- 
ceived the presentment of criminals and the inquests of the local 
jurors, assessed the taxation of each district, or listened solemnly 
to appeals for justice, civil and criminal, from all who held them- 
selves oppressed in the lesser courts of the hundred or the soke. 
It was in the county court alone that the sheriff could legally 
summon the lesser baronage to attend the Great Council, and it 
was in the actual constitution of this assembly that the Crown 
found a solution of the difficulty. which we have already stated. 
For the principle of representation by which it was finally solved 
was coeval with the shire- court itself. In all cases of civil or 
criminal justice the twelve sworn assessors of the sheriff repre- 
sented the judicial opinion of the county at large. From every 
hundred came groups of twelve sworn deputies, the "jurors," 
through whom the presentments of the district were made to the 
royal officer, and with whom the assessment of its share in the 
general taxation was arranged. The husbandmen on the outskirts 
of the crowd, clad in the brown smock-frock which still lingers in 
the garb of our carters and plowmen, were broken up into little 
knots of five, a reeve and four assistants, who formed the repre- 
sentatives of the rural townships. If, in fact, we regard the shire- 
courts as lineally the descendants of our earliest English parlia- 
ments, we may justly claim the principle of parliamentary repre- 
sentation as among the oldest of our institutions. But it was only 
slowly and tentatively that this principle was applied to the re- 
constitution of the Great Council. As early as the close of John's 
reign there are indications of the approaching change in the sum- 
mons of " four discreet knights" from every county. Fresh need 
of local support was felt by both parties in the conflict of the suc- 
ceeding reign, and Henry and his barons alike summoned knights 
from each shire "to meet on the common business of the realm." 
It was no doubt with the same purpose that the writs of Earl 
Simon ordered the choice of knights in each shire for his famous 
parliament of 1265. Something like a continuous attendance may 
be dated from the accession of Edward, but it was long before the 
knights were regarded as more than local deputies for the* assess- 
ment of taxation, or admitted to a share in the general business 
of the Great Council. The statute " QuiaEmptores," for instance, 
was passed in it before the knights who had been summoned could 
attend. Their participation in the deliberative power of Parlia- 
ment, as well as their regular and continuous attendance, dates 
only from the Parliament of 1295. But a far greater constitu- 
tional change in their position had already taken place through 
the extension of electoral rights to the freeholders at large. The 
one class entitled to a seat in the Great Council was, as we have 
seen, that of the lesser baronage, and of the lesser baronage alone 
the knights were in theory the representatives. But the necessi- 
ty of holding their election in the county court rendered any re- 
striction of the electoral body physically impossible. The court 
was composed of the whole body of freeholders, and no sheriff 
could distinguish the " aye, aye" of the yeoman from the "aye, 



198 



HISTORY OF IRE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ays" of the squire. From the first moment, therefore, of their at- 
tendance we find the knights regarded not as mere representa- 
tives of the baronage, but knights of the shire, and by this silent 
revohition the whole body of the rural freeholders were admitted 
to a share in the government of the realm. 

The financial difiiculties of the Crown led to a far more radical 
revolution in the admission into the Great Council of represent- 
atives from the boroughs. The presence of knights from each 
shire was, as we have seen, the recognition of an older right, but 
no right of attendance or share in the national " counsel and as- 
sent" could be pleaded for the burgesses of the towns. On the 
other hand, the rapid development of their wealth made them ev- 
ery day more important as elements in the national taxation. The 
towns had long since freed themselves from all payment of the 
dues or fines exacted by the King, as the original proprietor of 
the soil on which they had in most cases grown up, by what was 
called the purchase of the "farm of the borough;" in other words, 
by the commutation of those uncertain dues for a fixed sum paid 
annually to the Crown, and apportioned by their own magistrates 
among the general body of the burghers. All that tlie Crown le- 
gally retained was the right enjoyed by every great proprietor of 
levying a corresponding taxation on its tenants in demesne under 
the name of " a free aid," whenever a grant was made for the na- 
tional necessities by the barons of the Great Council. But the 
temptation of appropriating the growing wealth of the mercantile 
class proved stronger than legal restrictions, and we find both 
Henry the Third and his son assuming a riglit of imposing taxes 
at pleasure and without any authority from the Council even over 
London itself The burgesses could refuse indeed the invitation 
to contribute to the " free aid" demanded by the royal officers, 
but the suspension of their markets or trading privileges soon 
brought them to submission. Each of these " free aids," however, 
had to be extoi-ted after a long wrangle between the borough and 
the officers of the Exchequer; and if the towns were driven to 
comply with what they considered an extoi'tiou, they could gen- 
erally force the Crown by evasions and delays to a compromise 
and abatement of its original demands. The same financial rea- 
sons, therefore, existed for desii'ing the presence of their repre- 
sentatives in the Great Council as existed in the case of the shires ; 
but it was the genius of Earl Simon which first broke through the 
older constitutional tradition, and dared to summon two burgess- 
es from each town to the Parliament of 1265. Time had, indeed, 
to pass before the large and statesman-like conception of the great 
patriot could meet with full acceptance. Through the earlier part 
of Edward's reign we find a few instances of the presence of rep- 
resentatives from the towns, but their scanty numbers and the ir- 
regularity of their attendance show that they were summoned 
rather to afibrd financial information to the Great Council than 
as representatives in it of an estate of the realm. But every 
year pleaded stronger and stronger for the eai-l's conception, and 
in the Parliament of 1295 that of 1265 found itself at last repro- 



IV.] 



THE TRUEE EDWARDS. 



199 



duced. " It was from me that he learned it," Earl Simon had cried, 
as he recognized the military skill of Edward's onset at Evesham; 
" It was from me that he learned it," his spirit might have ex- 
claimed, as he saw the King gathering at last two burgesses " from 
every city, borough, and leading town" within his realm to sit side 
by side with the knights, nobles, and barons of the Great Council. 
To the Crown the change was from the first an advantageous one. 
The grants of subsidies by the burgesses in Parliament proved far 
more profitable than the previous extortions of the Exchequer. 
The proportion of their grant generally exceeded that of the oth- 
er estates by a tenth. Their representatives too proved far more 
compliant with the royal will than the barons or knights of the 
shire; only on one occasion during Edward's reign did the bur- 
gesses waver from their general support of the Crown. It was easy 
indeed to control them, for the selection of boroughs to be repre- 
sented remained wholly in the King's hands, and their numbers 
could be increased or diminished at the King's pleasure. The de- 
termination was left to the sheriff, and at a hint from the Royal 
Council a sheriff of Wilts would cut down the number of repre- 
sented boroughs in his shire from eleven to three, or a sheriff of 
Berks declare he could find but a single borough, that of Wy- 
combe, within the bounds of the county. Nor was this exercise 
of the prerogative hampered by any anxiety on the part of the 
towns to claim representative privileges. It was difiicult to sus- 
pect that a power before which the Crown would have to bow lay 
in the ranks of soberly clad traders, summoned only to assess the 
contributions of their boroughs, and whose attendance was as dif- 
ficult to secure as it seemed burdensome to themselves and the 
towns who sent them. The mass of citizens took little or no part 
in their choice, for they were elected in the county court by a few 
of the principal burghers deputed for the purpose ; but the cost 
of their maintenance, the two shillings a day paid to the burgess 
by his town as four were paid to the knight by his county, was a 
burden from which the boroughs made desperate efforts to escape. 
Some persisted in making no return to the sheriff till their names 
from sheer disuse dropped off the Parliament-roll. Some bought 
charters of exemption from the troublesome privilege. Of the 165 
who were summoned by Edward the First, more than a third ei- 
ther took no notice of the writs whatever or ceased to do so after 
a single compliance with them. During the whole time from the 
reign of Edward the Third to the reign of Henry the Sixth the 
sheriff of Lancaster declined to return the names of any boroughs 
at all within that county, " on account of their poverty." Nor 
were the representatives themselves more anxious to appear than 
their boroughs to send them. The busy country squire and the 
thrifty trader were equally reluctant to undergo the trouble and 
expense of a journey to Westminster. Legal measures were often 
necessary to insure their presence. Writs still exist in abundance 
such as that by which Walter le Rous is " held to bail in eight 
oxen and four cart-horses to come before the King on the day 
specified" for attendance in Parliament. But in spite of obstacles 



!00 



HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Tub English 
Parlia- 
ment. 

1283- 
1295. 



The early 
parlia- 
iiients. 



such as these the presence of representatives frona the borough 
may he regarded as continuous from the Parliament of 1295. As 
the representation of the lesser barons had widened through a si- 
lent change into that of the shire, so that of the boroughs — re- 
stricted in theory to those in royal demesne — seems practically 
from Edward's time to have been extended to all who were in a 
condition to pay the cost of their representatives' support. By a 
change as silent within the Parliament itself we shall soon see the 
burgess, originally summoned to take part only in matters of tax- 
ation, admitted to a full share in the deliberations and authority of 
the other orders of the state. 

The admission of the burgesses and knights of the shire to the 
assembly of 1295 completed the fabric of our representative con- 
stitution. The Great Council of the Barons had become the Par- 
liament of the realm, a parliament in which every order of the 
state found itself represented, and took part in the grant of sup- 
plies, the work of legislation, and the control of government. But 
though in all essential points the character of Parliament has re- 
mained the same from that time to this, there were some remark- 
able particulars in which this great assembly as it was left by 
Edvvard the First diiFered widely from the present Parliament at 
St. Stephen's. Some of these differences, such as those which 
sprang from the increased powers and changed relations of, the 
different orders among themselves, we shall have occasion to con- 
sider at a later time. But a difference of a far more startling kind 
than these lay in the presence of the clergy. If there is any part 
in the Parliamentary scheme of Edward the First which can be 
regarded as especially his own, it is his project for the representa- 
tion of the ecclesiastical order. The King had twice at least sum- 
moned its "proctors" to Parliament before 1295, but it was then 
only that the complete representation of the Church was definite- 
ly organized by the insertion of a clause in the writ which sum- 
moned a bishop to Parliament requiring the personal attendance 
of all archdeacons, deans, or priors of cathedral churches, of a 
proctor for each cathedral chapter, and two for the clergy within 
his diocese. The clause is repeated in the writs of the present 
day, but its practical effect was foiled almost from the first by 
the resolute opposition of those to whom it was addressed. What 
the towns failed in doing the clergy actually did. Even when 
forced to comply with the royal summons, as they seem to have 
been, forced during EdAvard's reign, they sat jealously by them- 
selves; and their refusal to vote supplies in any but their own 
provincial assemblies, or convocations, of Canterbury and York, 
left the Crown without a motive for insisting on their continued 
attendance. Their presence, indeed, though still occasionally 
granted on some solemn occasions, became so pure a formality 
that by the end of the fifteenth century it had sunk wholly into 
desuetude. In their anxiety to preserve their existence as an iso- 
lated and privileged order, the clergy flung away a power which, 
had they retained it, would have ruinously hampered the healthy 
development of the state. To take a single instance, it is difficult 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



201 



to see how the great changes of the Reformation could have been 
brought about had a good half of the House of Commons consist- 
ed purely of churchmen, whose numbers would have been backed 
by the ueight of property as possessors of a third of the landed 
estates of the realm. A hardly less important difference may be 
found in the gradual restriction of the meetings of Parliament to 
Westminster. The names of the early statutes remind us of its 
convocation at the most various quarters, at Winchester, Acton 
Burnell, Northampton, or Oxford. It was at a later time that 
Parliament became settled in the straggling village which had 
grown up in the marshy swamp of the Isle of Thorns, beside the 
palace whose embattled pile towered over the Thames and the 
great minster which was still rising in Edvv^ard's day on the site 
of the older church of the Confessor. It is possible that, while 
contributing greatly to its constitutional importance, this settle- 
ment of the Parliament may have helped to throw into the back- 
ground its character as a supreme court of appeal. The proclama- 
tion by which it was called together invited " all who had any 
grace to demand of the King ia Parliament, or any plaint to make 
of matters which could not be redressed or determined by ordi- 
nary course of law, or who had been in any M'ay aggrieved by 
any of the King's ministers or justices or sheriffs, or their bailiffs, 
or any other officer, or have been unduly assessed, rated, charged 
or surcharged to aids, subsidies, or taxes," to deliver their peti- 
tions to receivers who sat in the Great Hall of the Palace of West- 
minster. The petitions were forwarded to the King's Council, 
and it was probably the extension of the jurisdiction of that body, 
and the subsequent rise of the Court of Chancery, which reduced 
this ancient right of the subject to the formal election of "Triers 
of Petitions" at the opening of every new Parliament by the 
House of Lords, a usage which is still continued. But it must 
have been owing to some memory of the older custom that the 
subject always looked for redress against injuries from the Crown 
or its ministers to the Parliament of the realm. 



Section III.— Tllie Conquest of Scotland, 1290—1305. 

[Authorities. — Scotland itself has no contemporary chronicles for this period : the 
Jingle of Blind Harry is two hundred years later than the death of its hero, Wal- 
lace. Those of England are meagre and inaccurate ; the most important are the 
"Annales Anglije Scotioe" and "Annales Kegni ScotiiB,"Rishanger's Chronicle, his 
"Gesta Edwardi Primi,"and three fragments of annals (all published by the Master 
of the Rolls), with the portion of the so-called Walsingham's History which relates 
to this time, now attributed by its latest editor, Mr. Riley, to Ris'hanger's hand. 
Hemingford, though of somewhat later date, adds some interesting details. But 
the main source of our information lies in the copious collection of state pnpers pre- 
served in Rymer's "Eoedera,"in the "Rotuli Scoti£e,"and in the "Documents and 
Records illustrating the History of Scotland," edited by Sir E. Palgrave. Mr. Rob- 
ertson, in his " Scotland under her Early Kings," has admirably illustrated the ages 
before the quarrel, and Mr. Burton, in his "History of Scotland," has stated the 
quarrel itself with great accuracy and fairness. For Edward's side, sec the preface 
of Sir F. Palgrave to the work above, and Mr. Freeman's essay on " The Relations 
between the Crown of England and Scotland."] 



202 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



If the personal charactei- of Edward the First had borne but a 
small part in the constitutional changes which we have described, 
it becomes of the highest moment during the war with Scotland 
which covers the latter half of his reign. 

In his own time, and among his own subjects, Edward was the 
object of almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest 
sense a national king. At the moment when the distinction be- 
tween conquerors and conquered had passed away, and England 
felt herself once more a people, she saw in her ruler no stranger, 
but an Englishman, The national tradition returned in more than 
the golden hair or the English -name which linked him to her ear- 
lier kings. Edward's very temper was English to the core. In 
good as in evil he stands out as the typical representative of his 
race, willful and imperious as his people, tenacious of his rights, 
indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, 
narrow in sympathy, but in the main just, unselfish, laborious, con- 
scientious, haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temper- 
ate, reverent of duty, religious. He had inherited the fierce ruth- 
lessness of the Angevins, so that, when he punished, his punish- 
ments were without pity, and a priest who had ventured into his 
presence with a remonstrance from his order dropped dead from 
sheer fright at his feet. But for the most part his impulses were 
generous, trustful, averse from cruelty, prone to forgiveness. '' No 
man ever asked mercy of me," he said in his old age, "and was 
refused." The rough soldierly nobleness of his nature breaks out 
at Falkirk, where he lay on the bare ground among his men, or in 
his refusal during a Welsh campaign to drink of the one cask of 
wine which had been saved from marauders: "It is I who have 
brought you into this strait," he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers, 
" and I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink." A 
strange tenderness and sensitiveness to aflfection lay in fact be- 
neath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing. Every yeo- 
man throughout his realm was drawn closer to the King who 
wept bitterly at the news of his father's death, though it gave 
him a crown ; whose fiercest burst of vengeance was called out 
by an insult to his mother ; whose crosses rose, as memorials of 
his love and sorrow, at every spot where his wife's bier rested. 
"I loved her tenderly in her lifetime," wrote Edward to Eleanor's 
friend, the Abbot of Clugny ; " I do not cease to love her now she 
is dead." And as it was with wife and child, so it was with his 
people at large. All the self-concentrated isolation of the earlier 
Angevins disappears in Edward. He is the first English king 
since the Conquest who loves his people with a personal love, and 
craves for their love back again. To his trust in them we owe 
our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which 
stand in the forefront of our laws. But even in his struggles with 
her England understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, 
and the quarrels between king and people during his reign are 
quarrels where, fiercely as they fought, neither disputant doubted 
for a moment the worth or aflfection of the other. Few scenes in 
our history are more touching than that which closes the long con- 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWABDS. 



203 



test over the Charter, when Edward stood face to face" with his 
people in Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears own- 
ed himself frankly in the wrong. 

But it Avas just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer impres- 
sions and outer influences, that led to" the strange contradictions 
which meet us in Edward's career. Under the first king whose 
temper was distinctly English a foreign influence told most fatal- 
ly on our manners, our literature, our national spirit. The sudden 
rise of France into a compact and organized monarchy from the 
time of Philip Augustus had now made its influence dominant in 
Western Europe. The "chivalry" so familiar in Froissart,with its 
picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, of heroism, love, and courte- 
sy — a mimicry befoi'e which all depth and reality of nobleness 
disappeared to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrow- 
est caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human sufiering — was 
specially of French creation. There was a nobleness in Edward's 
nature from which the baser influences of chivalry fell away. His 
life was pure, his piety, even when it stooped to the superstition 
of the time, manly and sincere, while his high sense of duty saved 
him from the frivolous self-indulgence of his successors. But 
he was far from being wholly free from the taint of his age. His 
passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable knighthood 
of his day. He had been famous from his very youth as a con- 
summate general ; Earl Simon had admired the skill of his ad- 
vance at Evesham, and in his Welsh campaign he had shown a 
tenacity and force of will which wrested victory out of the midst 
of defeat. He could head a furious charge of horse at Lewes, or 
organize a commissariat which enabled him to move army after 
army across the harried Lowlands. In his old age he was quick 
to discover the value of the English archery, and to employ it as 
a means of victory at Falkirk. But his fame as a general seemed 
a small thing to Edward in comparison with his fame as a knight. 
He shared to the full his people's love of hard fighting. His frame, 
indeed, was that of a born soldier — tall, deep-chested, long of limb, 
capable alike of endurance or action. While fresh from the tri- 
umph of Evesham he encountered Adam Gurdou, a famous free- 
booter, and single-handed forced him to beg for mercy. At the 
opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer hard fighting in a 
tournament at Chalons. He was the first sovereign to introduce 
the sham warfare of the Tournament into England, where it had 
been rigidly prohibited by his predecessors and forbidden by the 
Church. We see the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry in 
his "Round Table" at Kenilworth, where a hundred knights and 
ladies, "clad all in silk," renewed the faded glories of Arthur's 
Court. The false air of romance which was soon to turn the 
gravest political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental feel- 
ing appears in his "Vow of the Swan," when, rising at the royal 
board, the old man swore on the dish before him to avenge on 
Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet 
more fatal influence in its narrowing of all sympathy to the noble 
class, and its exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all 



Seo. III. 



1290- 
1305. 



204 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



claim to pity. It is the "knight without reproach" who looks 
calmly on at the massacre of Berwick, and sees in William Wal- 
lace nothing but a common robber. 

Hardly less powerful than the French notion of chivalry in its 
influence on Edward's min'd was the new French conception of 
kingship, feudality, and law. The rise of a lawyer class was ev- 
eiy where hardening customarj^ into written rights, allegiance into 
subjection, loose ties, such as commendation, into a definite vassal- 
age. But it was specially through Fi-ench influence, the influence 
of St. Lewis and his successors, that the imperial theories of the 
Roman Law were brought to bear upon this natural tendency of 
the time. When the " sacred majesty" of the Cgesars was transfer- 
red by a legal fiction to the royal head of a feudal baronage, ev- 
ery constitutional relation was radically changed. The " defi- 
ance" by which a vassal renounced service to his lord became 
treason, his after-resistance " sacrilege." That Edward could ap- 
j^reciate what was sound and noble in the legal spirit around him 
was shown in his reforms of our judicature and our Parliament ; 
but there was something even more congenial to his mind in its 
definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He was never 
willfully unjust, but he was captious in his justice, fond of legal 
chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law. He 
was never willfully untruthful; his abhorrence of falsehood shqw- 
ed itself in the words of his motto, "Keep Troth," but he kept his 
trotli in the spirit of a peddling attorney. The high conception 
of royalty which he had borrowed from St. Lewis united with this 
legal turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign. Of rights or lib- 
erties unregistered in charter or roll Edward would know noth- 
ing. On the other hand, he was himself overpowered by the maj- 
esty of his crown. It was incredible to him that Scotland should 
revolt against a legal bargain which made her national independ- 
ence conditional on the terms extorted from a claimant of her 
throne ; nor could he view in any other light but as treason the 
resistance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which 
their fathers had borne. It is in the very anomalies of such a 
character, in its strange union of justice and wrong-doing, of no- 
bleness and meanness, that we must look for the explanation of 
Edward's conduct and policy in his later years. 

Fairly to understand his quarrel with the Scots, we must clear 
our minds of the ideas which we now associate with the Avords 
"Scotland," or the "Scotch people." At the opening of the four- 
teenth century the kingdom of the Scots was an aggregate of at 
least four distinct countries, each with its different people, its dif- 
ferent tongue, its diffei'ent history. The first of these was the dis- 
trict once called "Saxony," and which now bears the name of the 
Lowlands, the space, roughly speaking, between the Forth and the 
Tweed. We have seen that at the close of the English conquest 
of Britain the kingdom of JSTorthumbria stretched from the Plum- 
ber to the Firth of Forth, and of this kingdom the Lowlands form-, 
ed simply the northern portion. The English conquest and the 
English colonization were as complete hei-e as over the rest of 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



205 



Britain. Rivers and hills indeed retained their Celtic names, but 
the " tons" and " hams" scattered over the country told the story 
of its Teutonic settlement. Dodings and Levings left their name 
to Dodington and Livingston ; Elphinston and Edmundston pre- 
served the memory of English Elfins and Edmunds who had raised 
their homesteads along the Teviot and the Tweed. To the north- 
ward and westward of this Northumbrian land lay the kingdoms 
of the conquered. Over the "Waste," or "Desert" — the range of 
barren moors which stretches from Derbyshire to the Cheviots — 
the Briton had sought a refuge in the long strij) of coast between 
the Clyde and the Dee which formed the earlier Cumbria. Against 
this kingdom the efforts of the Northumbrian rulers had been in- 
cessantly directed ; the victory of Chester had severed it from the 
Welsh kingdoms to the south ; Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cum- 
berland were already subdued by the time of Ecgfrith; while the 
wretched fragment which was suffered to remain unconquered be- 
tween the Firths of Sol way and of Clyde, and to which the name of 
Cumbria is in its later use confined, owned the English supremacy. 
At the close of the seventh century, indeed, it seemed likely that the 
same supremacy would extend over the Welsh tribes to the north. 
To these Picts of the Highlands the land south of the Forth was a 
foreign land, and significant entries in their rude chronicles tell us 
how in their forays " the Picts made a raid upon Saxony." But 
they had long bowed to a vague acknowledgment of the English 
overlordship : the English fortress of Edinburgh looked menacing- 
ly across the Forth, and at Abercorn beside it was established an 
English prelate with the title of Bishop of the Picts. Ecgfrith, in 
whose hands the power of Northumbria reached its highest point, 
marched across Forth to change this overlordship into a direct 
dominion, and to bring the series of English victories to a close. 
His host poured burning and ravaging across the Tay, and skirt- 
ed the base of the Grampians as far as the field of Nectansmere, 
where King Bruidi awai,ted them at the head of the Picts, The 
great battle which followed proved a turning-point in the history 
of the North ; the invaders were cut to pieces, Ecgfrith himself 
being among the slain, and the power of Northumbria was broken 
forever. On the other hand, the kingdom of the Picts started into 
new life with its great victory, and pushed its way in the hundred 
years that followed westward, eastward, and southward, till the 
whole country north of the Forth and the Clyde acknowledged its 
supremacy. But the hour of Pictish greatness was marked by the 
sudden extinction of the Pictish name. Centuries before, when 
the English invaders were beginning to harry the south coast of 
Britain, a fleet of coracles had borne a tribe of the Scots, as the 
inhabitants of Ireland were at that time called, from the white 
cliff-walls of Antrim to the rocky and indented coast of South 
Argyle. The little kingdom of Scot-land which these L-ishmen 
founded slumbered in obscurity among the lakes and mountains 
to the south of Loch Lynne, now submitting to the overlordship 
of Northumbria, now to that of the Picts, till the extinction of the 
direct Pictish line of sovereigns raised the Scot King, Kenneth 



206 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Mac-alpin, who chanced to be their nearest kinsman, to the vacant 
throne. For fifty years these rulers of Scottish blood still call 
themselves " Kings of the Picts ;" but with the opening of the 
tenth century the very name passes away, the tribe which had 
given its chief to the common throne gives its designation to the 
common realm, and "Pict-land" vanishes from the page of the 
chronicler or annalist to make way for the " land of the Scots." 

It was even longer before the change made way among the 
people itself, and the real union of the nation with its kings was 
only effected by the common suffering of the Danish wars. In the 
North, as in the South of Britain, the invasion of the Danes brought 
about political unity. Not only were Picts and Scots thoroughly 
blended into a single people, but by the annexation of Cumbria 
and the Lowlands, their monarchs became rulers of the territory 
which we now call Scotland. The annexation was owing to the 
new policy of the English kings. Their aim, after the long strug- 
gle of England with the Northmen, was no longer to crush the 
kingdom across the Forth, but to raise it into a bulwark against 
the Danes who were still settled in Caithness and the Orkneys, and 
for whose aggressions Scotland was the natural highway. On the 
other hand, it was only in English aid that the Scot kings could 
find a support for their throne against these Danish Jarls of Ork- 
ney and Caithness. It was probably this common hostility to a 
common foe which brought about the " commendation" by which 
the Scots bej'^ond the Forth, with the Welsh of Strathclyde, chose 
the English King, Eadward the Elder, "to father and lord." The 
choice, whatever weight after-events may have given to it, seems 
to have been little more than the renewal of the loose English 
supremacy over the tribes of the North which had existed during 
the times of Northumbrian greatness ; it certainly implied at the 
time nothing save a right on either side to military aid, though 
the aid then rendered was necessarily placed in the hands of the 
stronger party to the agreement. Such a connection naturally 
ceased in the event of any war between the two contracting par- 
ties ; it was in fact by no means the feudal vassalage of a later 
time, but rather such a military convention as existed after Sa- 
dowa between the North-German Confederation and the States 
south of the Main. But loose as was the tie which bound the two 
countries, a closer tie soon bound the Scot King himself to his En- 
glish overlord. Strathclyde, which, after the defeat of Nectans- 
mere, had shaken off the English yoke, and which at a later time 
had owned the supremacy of the Scots, rose into a temporary in- 
dependence only to be conquered by the Englisli Eadmund. By 
him it was granted to Malcolm of Scotland on the feudal tenure 
of distinct military service, and became from that time the ap- 
panage of the eldest son of the Scottish King, At a later time, 
under Edgar or Cnut, the whole of Northern Northumbria, or what 
we now call the Lothians, was ceded to the Scottish sovereigns, 
but whether on the same terms of feudal dependence as an ordi- 
nary English earldom or on the same loose terras of "commenda- 
tion" as already existed for lands north of the Forth, we have no 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



207 



means of deciding. The retreat, however, of the bounds of the 
great English bishopric of the North, the see of St. Cuthbert, as 
far southward as the Pentland Hills, would seem to imply a great- 
er change in the political character of the ceded district than the 
first theory would allow. 

Whatever change these sessions may have brought about in the 
relation of the Scot kings to their English overlords, they cer- 
tainly alFected in a very marked way their relation both to En- 
gland and to their own realm. The first result of the acquisition 
of the Lowlands was the fixing of the royal residence in their new 
southern dominions at Edinburgh ; and the English civilization 
with which they were then surrounded changed the Scot kings 
in all but blood into Englishmen. A way soon opened itself to 
the English crown by the marriage of Malcolm w^ith Margaret, 
the sister of Eadgar ^theling. Their children were regai'ded by 
a large party within England as representatives of the older roy- 
al race and as claimants of the throne, and this danger grew as 
the terrible ISTorman devastation of the North not only drove 
fresh multitudes of Englishmen to settle in the Lowlands, but 
filled the Scotch court with English nobles who had fled thith- 
er for refuge. So formidable, indeed, became the pretensions of 
the Scot kings, that they forced the ablest of our Norman sov- 
ereigns into a complete change of policy. The Conqueror and 
William the Red had met the threats of the Scot sovereigns by 
invasions which ended again and again in an illusory homage. 
The marriage of Henry the First with the Scottish princess Ma- 
tilda not only robbed of their force the claims of the Scottish line, 
but enabled him to draw it into far closer relations with the Nor- 
man throne. King David not only abandoned the ambitious 
dreams of his predecessors, to place himself at the head of his 
niece Matilda's party in her contest with Stephen, but as Henry's 
brother-in-law he figured as the first noble of the English court, 
and found English models and English support in the work of 
organization which he attempted within his own dominions. As 
the marriage with Margaret had changed Malcolm from a Celtic 
chieftain into an English king, so that of Matilda converted David 
into a Norman and feudal sovereign. His court was filled with 
Norman nobles from the South, such as the Balliols and Bruces 
who were destined to play so great a part afterward, but who 
now for the first time obtained fiefs in the Scottish realm, and a 
feudal jurisprudence modeled on that of England was introduced 
into the Lowlands. Throughout these changes of front, however, 
both at home and abroad, the question of the English overlordship 
remained unchanged. It was the capture of William the Lion 
during the revolt of the English baronage which first suggested 
to the ambition of Henry the Second the project of a closer de- 
pendence of Scotland on the English Crown. To gain his free- 
dom, William consented to hold his crown of Henry and his heirs, 
the prelates and lords of the Scotch kingdom did homage to Hen- 
ry as to their direct lord, and a right of appeal in all Scotch causes 
was allowed to the superior court of the English suzerain. From 



208 



SISTOBY OF TRE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



this bondage, howevei", Scotland was soon freed by the wise prod- 
iwality of Richard, who allowed her to repurchase the freedom she 
had forfeited, and from that time the difficulties of the older claim 
were prudently evaded by a legal compromise. The Scot King 
repeatedly did homage, but with a distinct protest that it was 
rendered for lands which he held in fief within the realm of En- 
gland. The English King accepted the homage with a counter- 
protest that it was rendered to liim as overlord of the Scottish 
realm. But for nearly a hundred years the relations of the two 
countries had remained peaceful and friendly, when the death of 
Alexander the Third seemed destined to remove even the necessi- 
ty of protests by a closer union of the two kingdoms. Alexander 
had left but a single grandchild, the daughter of the Norwegian 
King, and after long negotiation the Scotch Parliament proposed 
the marriage of " the Maid of Norway" Avith the son of Edward 
the First. It was, however, carefully provided in the marriage 
treaty of Brigham that Scotland should remain a separate and 
free kingdom, and that its laws and customs should be preserved 
inviolate. No military aid was to be claimed by the English 
King, no Scotch appeal to be carried to an English court. The 
project, however, was abruptly frustrated by the child's death on 
her voyage to Scotland, and with the rise of claimant after claim- 
ant of the vacant throne Edward was drawn into far other i;ela- 
tions to the Scottish realm. 

Of the thirteen pretenders to the throne of Scotland, only three 
could be regarded as serious claimants. By the extinction of the 
line of William the Lion the right of succession passed to the 
daughters of his brother David, and the claim of John Balliol, 
Lord of Galloway, rested on his descent from the elder of these ; 
that of Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale, on his descent from the 
second ; that of John Hastings, Lord of Abergavenny, on his de- 
scent from the third. 

It is clear that at this crisis every one in Scotland or out of it 
recognized some sort of overlordship in Edward, for the Norwe- 
gian King, the Primate of St. Andrews, and seven of the Scotch 
earls, had already appealed to him before Margaret's death, and 
the death itself was followed by the consent of both the claimants 
and the Council of Regency to refer the question of the succes- 
sion to his decision in a Parliament at Norham. But the over- 
lordship which the Scots acknowledged was something far less 
direct and definite than what Edward claimed at the opening of 
this conference. The royal claim was supported by excerpts from 
monastic chronicles, and by the slow advance of an English army; 
while the Scotch lords, taken by surprise, found little help in the 
delay which was granted them, and at last, in common Avith the 
claimants themselves, formally admitted Edward's direct suzerain- 
ty. To the nobles, in fact, the concession must have seemed a 
small one ; like the principal claimants they were for the most 
part Norman in blood, with estates in both countries, and looking 
for honors and pensions from the English court. From the Com- 
mons no admission of Edward's claims could be extorted; but in 



IV.] 



TEE TREEE EDWABDS. 



209 



Scotland, feudalized as it had been by David, the Commons were 
as yet of little weight, and theii- opposition was quietly passed by. 
All the rights of a feudal suzerain were at once assumed by the 
English King ; he entered into the possession of the country as 
into that of a disputed fief to be held by its overlord till the dis- 
pute was settled, his peace was sworn throughout the land, its cas- 
tles delivered into his charge, while its bishops and nobles swore 
homage to him directly as their lord superior. Scotland was thus 
reduced to the subjection which she had experienced under Henry 
the Second, but the full discussion which followed over the vari- 
ous claims to the throne showed that, while exacting to the full 
what he believed to be his right, Edward desired to do justice to 
the country itself. The body of commissioners Avhich the King 
nominated were mainly Scotch, a proposal for the partition of the 
realm among the claimants was rejected as contrary to Scotch 
law, and the claim of Balliol as representative of the elder branch 
preferred to that of his rivals. 

The castles were at once delivered to the new monarch, and 
Balliol did homage to Edward with full acknowledgment of the 
services due to him from the realm of Scotland. For a time there 
was peace. Edward in fact seemed to have no desire to push 
farther the rights of his crown. Even allowing* that Scotland 
was a dependent kingdom, it was far from being according to 
feudal custom an ordinary fief A distinction had always been 
held to exist between the relation of a dependent king to his su- 
perior lord and those of a vassal noble to his sovereign. At Bal- 
liol's homage, Edward had disclaimed, in strict accordance with the 
marriage treaty of Brigham, any right to the ordinary incidents 
of a fief, those of wardship or marriage ; but there were other cus- 
toms of the realm of Scotland as incontestable as these. Ecclesi- 
astically, Scotland was independent of any see but that of Rome. 
Its sovereign again had never been held bound to attend the 
Council of the English Baronage, to do service in English warfare, 
or to contribute on the part of his Scotch possessions to English 
aids. N^o express acknowledgment of these rights had been given 
by Edward, but for a time they were practically observed. The 
right of free justice was as clear as the i-est. Since the days of 
William the Lion no appeal from a Scotch king's court to that 
of his overlord had been allowed, and the judicial independence 
of Scotland had been expressly acknowledged in the marriage 
treaty. This right of appeal Edward now determined to enforce, 
and Balliol at first gave way. The resentment, however, both of 
his baronage and his people, forced him to resist ; and while ap- 
peai'ing formally at Westminster he refused to answer an appeal 
save by the advice of his Council. He Avas in fiict looking to 
France, which, as we shall afterward see, Avas jealously watching 
Edward's proceedings, and ready to force him into war. By a new 
breach of customary law Edward summoned the Scotch nobles to 
follow him in arms against this foreign foe. But the summons was 
disregarded, and a second and formal refusal of aid was followed 

U 



210 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Tub 
Conquest or 

S(;OTLANK. 



by a secret alliance with France and by a Pai>al absolution of Bal- 
liol from his oath of fealtj''. 

Edward was still relnctant to begin the war, when his scruples 
were relieved by the refusal of Balliol to attend his Parliament at 
Newcastle, the massacre of a small body of English troops, and 
the investment of Carlisle by the Scots. Orders were at once 
given for an advance npon Berwick. The taunts of its citizens 
stung the King to the quick. " Kynge Edward, waune thou havest 
Berwick, pike thee ; Avaune thou havest geten, dike thee," they 
shouted from behind the wooden stockade, which formed the only 
rampart of the town. But the stockade was stormed with the 
loss of a single knight, and nearly eight thousand of the citizens 
were mown down in a ruthless carnage, while a handful of Flemish 
traders who held the town-hall stoutly against all assailants were 
burned alive in it. The massacre only ceased when a procession of 
priests bore the host to the King's presence, praying for mercy, 
and Edward with a sudden and characteristic burst of tears called 
off his troops ; but the town M'as ruined forever, and the great 
merchant city of the North sank from that time into a petty sea- 
port. At Berwick Edward received Balliol's defiance. "Has the 
fool done this folly?" the King cried in haughty scorn. "If he 
will not come to us, we will come to him." The terrible slaughter, 
however, had done its work, and his march was a triumphal prog- 
ress. Edinburgh, Stirling, and Perth opened their gates, Bnice 
joined the English army, and Balliol himself surrendered and 
passed without a blow from his throne to an English prison. No 
further punishment, however, Avas exacted from the prostrate 
realm. Edward simply treated it as a fief, and declared its for- 
feiture to be the legal consequence of Balliol's treason. It lapsed 
in fact to the overlord, and its earls, barons, and gentry swore 
homage in Parliament at Berwick to Edward as their king. The 
sacred stone on which its older sovereigns had been installed, an 
oblong block of limestone, which legend asserted to have been the 
pillow of Jacob as angels ascended and descended upon him, was 
removed from Scone and placed in Westminster by the shrine of 
the Confessor. It was inclosed by Edward's order in a stately 
seat, which became from that hour the coronation chair of English 
kings. 

To the King himself the Avhole business must have seemed 
another and easier conquest of Wales, and the mercy and just 
government which had followed his first success followed his sec- 
ond also. The government of the new dependency was intrust- 
ed to Warrenne, Earl of Surrey, at the head of an English Coun- 
cil of Regency. Pardon Avas freely extended to all Avho had 
resisted the invasion, and order and public peace Avere rigidly 
enforced. But both the justice and injustice of the new rule 
proved fatal to it ; the Avrath of the Scots, already kindled by 
the intrusion of English priests into Scotch livings, and by the 
grant of lands across the border to English barons, Avas fan- 
ned to fury by the strict administration of law, and the repres- 
sion of feuds and cattle -lifting. The disbanding, too, of troops, 



IV.] 



THE TRTiEE EDWARDS. 



211 



which was caused by the penury of the royal exchequer, united 
with the license of the soldiery who remained as a protection of 
the English rule to quicken the national sense of wrong. The 
disgraceful submission of their leaders brought the peoj^le them- 
selves to the front. In spite of a hundred years of peace the 
farmer of the Lowlands and the artisan of the towns remained 
stout-hearted Northumbrian Englishmen; they had never con- 
sented to Edward's supremacy, and their blood rose against the 
insolent rule of the stranger. The genius of an outlaw knight, 
William Wallace, saw in their smouldering discontent a hope of 
freedom for his country, and his daring raids on outlying parties 
of the English soldiery soon roused the Lowlands into revolt. Of 
Wallace himself, of his life or temper, we know little or nothing ; 
the very traditions of his gigantic stature and enormous strength 
are dim and unhistorical. But the instinct of the Scotch people 
has guided it aright in choosing Wallace for its national hero. 
He was the first to sweep aside the technicalities of feudal law 
and to assert freedom as a national birthright. Amid the despair 
of nobles and priests he called the people itself to arms, and his 
discovery of the military value of the stout peasant footman, who 
had till then been scorned by baronage and knighthood — a dis- 
covery copied by the burghers of Flanders, and rejDeated in the 
victories of the Swiss — gave a death-blow to the system of feudal- 
ism and changed in the end the face of Europe. At the head of 
an army drawn principally from the coast districts north of the 
Tay, which were inhabited by a population of the same blood as 
that of the Lowlands, Wallace occupied the valley near Stirling, 
the pass between the North and the South, and awaited the En- 
glish advance. The offers of Earl Warrenne were scornfully re- 
jected : "We have come here," said the Scottish leader, "not for 
peace, but to free our country." The position of Wallace, a serai- 
circle of hills behind a loop of Forth, was in fact chosen with con- 
summate skill. The one bridge which crossed the river w-as only 
broad enough to admit tw^o horsemen abreast; and though the 
English army had been passing from day-break, only half its force 
was across at noon when Wallace closed on it and cut it, after a 
short combat, to pieces, in the sight of its helpless comrades. 
The retreat of Warrenne over the border left Wallace head of the 
country he had freed, and for a time we find him acting as 
"Guardian of the Realm" in Balliol's name, and heading a wild 
foray into Northumberland. His reduction of Stirling Castle at 
last called Edward to the field. The King, who marched north- 
svard with a larger host than had ever followed his banner, was 
enabled by treachery to surprise Wallace, as he fell back to avoid 
»n engagement, and to force him to battle near Falkirk. The 
scotch force still consisted almost wholly of foot, and Wallace 
Irew up his spearmen in four great hollow circles or squares, the 
alter ranks kneeling, and the whole supported by bowmen within, 
I'hile a small force of horse were drawn up as a reserve in the 
ear. It was the formation of Waterloo, the first appearance in 
ur history since the day of Senlac of " that unconquerable British 



212 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



The 

Conquest of 

Scotland. 

1290- 

1305. 



infantry," before which chivalry was destined to go down. For 
a moment it had all Waterloo's success. " I have brought you to 
the ring, hop (dance) if you can," are words of rough humor that 
reveal the very soul of the patriot leader, and the serried ranks 
answered well to his appeal. The Bishop of Durham who led the 
English van shrank wisely from the look of the squares. " Back 
to your mass, bishop," shouted the reckless knights behind him, 
but the body of horse dashed itself vainly on the wall of spears. 
Terror spread through the English array, and its Welsh auxilia- 
ries drew off in a body from the field, till the generalship of Wal- 
lace was met by that of the King. Drawing his bowmen to the 
front, Edward riddled the Scottish ranks with arrows, and then 
hurled his cavalry afresh on the wavering front. In a moment 
all was over, and the maddened knights rode in and out of the 
broken ranks, slaying without mercy. Thousands fell on the field ; 
Wallace himself escaped with difiiculty, followed by a handful of 
men. But ruined as the cause of freedom seemed, his work was 
done; he had roused Scotland into life, and even a defeat like 
Falkirk left her unconquered. Edward remained master of the 
ground he stood on ; and as soon as want of supplies forced him 
to retreat, a native regency of the nobles under Bruce and Comyn 
continued the struggle for independence. For a time dangers 
from abroad stayed Edward's hand ; France was still menacing, 
and a claim advanced by Pope Boniface the Eightli, at its sugges- 
tion, to the feudal superiority over Scotland, arrested a fresh ad- 
vance of the King. The quarrel, however, between Philip le Bel 
and the Papacy which soon followed removed all obstacles, and 
enabled him to defy Boniface and to wring from France a treaty 
in which Scotland was abandoned. Edward at once resumed the 
work of invasion, and again the nobles flung down their arms as 
he marched to the North. Comyn, at the head of the Regency, 
acknowledged his sovereignty, and the surrender of Stirling com- 
pleted the conquest of Scotland. The triuuiph of Edward was 
but the prelude to the full execution of his designs for knitting 
the two countries together by a clemency and wisdom which re- 
veal the greatness of his statesmanship. A general amnesty was 
extended to all who had shared in the revolt. Wallace, who re- 
fused indeed to avail himself of Edwai'd's mercy, was captured, 
and condemned to death at Westminster on charges of treason, 
sacrilege, and robbery. The head of the great patriot, crowned 
in mockery with a circlet of laurel, was placed upon London 
Bridge. But the execution of Wallace was the one blot on Ed- 
ward's clemency. With a masterly boldness he intrusted the 
government of the country to a council of Scotch nobles, many of 
whom were freshly pardoned for their share in the war, and an- 
ticipated the policy of Cromwell by allotting ten representatives 
to Scotland in the Common Parliament of his realm. A 'convo- 
cation was summoned at Perth for the election of these repre- 
sentatives, and a great judicial scheme which was promulgated in 
this assembly adopted the amended laws of David as the base of 
a new legislation, and divided the country for judicial purposes 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWAEDS. 



213 



into foui- districts, Lothian, Galloway, the Highlands, and the land 
between the Highlands and the Forth, at the head of each of 
Avhieh were placed two justiciaries, the one English and the other 
Scotch. 

Section IV.— Tlie English Town. 

S Authorities. — For the General History of London see its "Liber Albus" and 
iber Custumarum," in the series of the Master of the Rolls; for its Communal 
Revolution, the "Liber de Antiquis Legibus," edited by Mr. Stapleton for the Cam- 
den Society ; for the rising of William Longbeard, the story in William of New- 
borough. "^In his "Essay on English Municipal History" (1867), Mr. Thompson has 
given a useful account of the relations of Leicester with its earls. A great store of 
documents will be found in the Charter Rolls published by the Record Commission, 
in Brady's work on English Boroughs, and (though rather for Parliamentary pur- 
poses) in Stephen's and Merewether's "History of Boroughs and Corporations." 
But the only full and scientific examination of our early municipal history, at least 
on one of its sides, is to be found in the Essay prefixed by Dr. Brentano to the " Or- 
dinances of English Guilds," published by the Early English Text Society.^ 



From scenes such as we have been describing, from the wrong 
and bloodshed of foreign conquest, we pass to the peaceful life and 
progress of England itself. 

Through the reign of the three Edwards two revolutions, which 
have been almost ignored by our historians, were silently chang- 
ing the whole character of English society. The first of these, the 
rise of a new class of tenant-farmers, we shall have to notice here- 
after in its connection with the great agrarian revolt which bears 
the name of Wat Tyler. The second, the rise of the craftsmen 
within our towns, and the struggle by which they won power and! 
privilege from the older burghers, is the most remarkable eventj, 
in the j^eriod of our national history at which we have arrived. 

We have already briefly described the outer progress of the 
earlier English boroughs. In England the town was originally, 
in every case save that of London, a mere bit of land within the 
lordship, whether of the king or some great noble or ecclesiastic, 
whose inhabitants 'happened, either for purposes of trade or pro- 
tection, to cluster together more closely than elsewhere. It is this 
characteristic of our boroughs that separates them at once from 
the cities of Italy and Provence, Avhich had preserved the munici- 
pal institutions of their Roman origins, from the German towns 
founded by Henry the Fowler with the special purpose of shelter- 
ing industry from the feudal oppression around them, or from the 
French communes which at a later time sprang into existence in 
sheer revolt against feudal outrage within their walls. In En- 
gland the tradition of Rome had utterly passed away, while the 
oppression of feudalism was held fairly in check by the power of 
the Crown. The English town, therefore, was in its beginning 
simply a piece of the general country, organized and governed in 
the same way as the manors around it; that is to say, justice was 
administered, its annual rent collected, and its customary serv- 
ices exacted by the reeve or steward of the lord to whose estate 



214 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



it belonged. To modern eyes the subjection which these services 
involved might seem complete. When Leicester, for instance, 
passed from the hands of the Conqueror into those of its earls, 
its townsmen were bound to reap their lord's corn-crops, to grind 
at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle from his pound. The 
great forest around was the earl's, and it was only out of his 
grace that the little borough could, drive its swine into the woods 
or pasture its cattle in the glades. The justice and government 
of the town lay wholly in its master's hands ; he appointed its 
bailiifs, received the fines and forfeitures of his tenants, and the 
fees and tolls of their markets and fairs. But when once these 
dues were paid and these services rendered the English towns- 
man was practically free. His rights were as rigidly defined by 
custom as those of his lord. Property and person alike were se- 
cured against arbitrary seizure. He could demand a fair trial on 
any charge, and even if justice Was administered by his master's 
reeve it was administered in the presence and with the assent of 
his fellow-townsmen. The bell which swung out from the town 
tower gathered the burgesses to a common meeting, where they 
could exercise rights of free speech and free deliberation on their 
own affair. Tlieir merchant- guild over its ale -feast regulated 
trade, distributed the sums due from the town among the diifer- 
ent burgesses, looked to the due repairs of gate and wall, and, act- 
ed, in fact, pretty much the same part as a town-council of to-day. 
Not only, too, were these rights s'ecured by custom from the first, 
but they were constantly widening as time went on. Whenever 
we get a glimj)se of the inner history of an English town, we find 
the same peaceful revolution in progress, services disappearing, 
through disuse or omission, while privileges and immunities are 
being purchased in hard cash. The lord of the town, whether he 
were king, baron, or abbot, was commonly thriftless or poor, and 
the capture of a noble, or the campaign of a sovereign, or the 
building of some new minster by a prior, brought about an ap- 
peal to the thrifty burghers, who were ready to fill again their 
master's treasury at the price of the strip of parchment which 
gave them freedom of trade, of justice, and of government. Some- 
times a chance story lights up for us this work of emancipation. 
At Leicester, one of the chief aims of its burgesses was to regain 
their old English jury trial (or practice of compurgation) which 
had been abolished by the earls in favor of the foreign trial by 
duek " It chanced," says a charter of the time, " that two kins- 
men, Nicholas the son of Aeon, and Geoffi'ey the son of Nicholas, 
waged a duel about a certain piece of land, concerning which a 
dispute had arisen between them; and they fought from the first 
to the ninth hour, each conquering by turns. Then one of them 
fleeing from the other till he came to a certain little pit, as he 
stood on the brink of the pit, and was about to fall therein, his 
kinsman said to him, ' Take care of the pit, turn back lest thou 
shouldest fall into it.' Thereat so much clamor and noise was 
made by the by-standers and those who were sitting around, that 
the Earl heard these clamors as far off as the castle, and he in- 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



215 



quired of some how it was tliere was such a clamor, and answer 
was made to him that two kinsmen were fighting about a certain 
piece of ground, and that one had fled till lie reached a certain 
little pit, and that as he stood over the pit and was about to fall 
into it the other warned him. Tiien the townsmen being moved 
with pitj^ made a covenant with the Earl that they should give 
him threepence yearly for each house in the High Street that had 
a gable, on condition that he should grant to them that the twen- 
ty-four jurors who were in Leicester from ancient times should 
from that time forward discuss and decide all pleas they might 
have among themselves." For the most part the liberties of our 
towns were bought in this way, by sheer hard bargaining. The 
earliest English charters, save that of London, date from the years 
when the treasury of Henry the First was drained by his Norman 
wars; and grants of municipal liberty made professedly by the 
Augevins are probably the result of their costly employment of 
mercenary troops. At the close, however, of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, this work of outer emancipation was practically complete. 
All the more important English towns had secured the right of 
justice in their own borough courts, of self-government, and of 
self-taxation, and their liberties and charters served as models 
and incentives to the smaller communities which were struggling 
into life. 

During the progress of this outer revolution, the inner life of 
the English town was in the same quiet and hardly conscious way 
developing itself from the common form of the life around it into 
a form especially its own. Within as without the ditch or stock- 
ade Avhich formed the first boundary of the borough, land was 
from the first the test of freedom, and the possession of land was 
what constituted the townsman. "We may take, perhaps, a for- 
eign instance to illustrate this fundamental point in our municipal 
history. When Duke Berthold of Zahringen resolved to found 
Freiburg, his "free town," in the Brisgau, the mode he adopted 
was to gather a group of traders together, and to give each man 
a plot of ground for his freehold round what was destined to be 
the market-place of the new community. Li England the " land- 
less" man had no civic as he had no national existence; the 
"town" was simply an association of the landed proprietors with- 
in its bound's; nor was there any thing in this association, as it 
originally existed, which could be considered peculiar or excep- 
tional. The constitution of the English town, however different 
its form may have afterward become, was at the first simply that 
of the people at large. We have before seen that among the Ger- 
man races society rested on the basis of the family, that it was the 
family who fought and settled side by side, and the kinsfolk Avho 
were bound together in ties of mutual responsibility to each other 
and to the laAv. As society became more complex and less sta- 
tionary it necessarily outgrew these simple ties of blood, and in 
England this dissolution of the family bond seems to have taken 
place at the very time when Danish incursions and the growth of 
a feudal temper among the nobles rendered an isolated existence 



216 



HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chat. 



Sec. IV. I most pet'ilous for the freeman. His only resource was to seek 
protection among his fellow-freemen, and to replace the older 
brotherhood of the kinsfolk by a voluntary association of his 
neighbors for the same purposes of order and self-defense. The 
tendency to unite in such "frith-guilds" or peace-clubs became 
general throughout Europe during the ninth and tenth centuries, 
but on the Continent it was roughly met and repressed. The suc- 
cessors of Charles the Great enacted penalties of scourging, nose- 
slitting, and banishment against voluntary unions, and even a 
league of the poor peasants of Gaul against the inroads of the 
Northmen was suppressed by the swords of the Frankish nobles. 
In England the attitude of the kings was utterly different. The 
system of "frank -pledge," or free engagement of neighbor for 
neighbor, was accepted after the Danish wars as the base of so- 
cial order, Alfred recognized the common responsibility of the 
members of the frith-guild side by side with that of the kinsfolk, 
and Athelstan accepted frith-guilds as the constituent element of 
borough life in the Dooms of London. 

The frith-guild, then, in the earlier English town, was precisely 
similar to the frith-guilds which formed the basis of social order 
in the country at large. An oath of mutual fidelity among its 
members was substituted for the tie of blood, while the guild- 
feast, held once a month in the common hall, replaced the gather- 
ing of the kinsfolk round their family hearth. But within this new 
family the aim of the frith-guild was to establish a mutual respon- 
sibility as close as that of the old. " Let all share the same lot," 
ran its law ; " if any misdo, let all bear it." Its member could look 
for aid from his guild-brothers in atoning for any guilt incurred by 
mishap. He could call on them for assistance in case of violence 
or wrong ; if falsely accused, they appeared in court as his com- 
purgators ; if poor, they supported, and when dead they buried him. 
On the other hand, he was responsible to them, as they were to the 
state, for order and obedience to the laws. A wrong of brother 
against Ijrother was also a wrong against the general body of the 
guild, and was punished by fine, or in the last resort by expulsion 
which left the offender a " lawless" man and an outcast. The one 
difference between these guilds in country and town was, that in 
the latter case, from their close local neighborhood, they tended in- 
evitably to coalesce. Under Athelstan the London guilds united 
into one for the purpose of carrying out more effectually their 
common aims, and at a later time we find the guilds of Berwick 
enacting "that where many bodies are found side by side in one 
place they may become one, and have one will, and in the dealings 
of one with another have a strong and hearty love." The process 
was probably a long and difficult one, for the brotherhoods natu- 
rally differed much in social rank, and even after the union was 
effected we see traces of the separate existence to a certain extent 
of some one or more of the wealthier or more aristocratic guilds. 
In London, for instance, the knighten-guild, which seems to have 
stood at the head of its fellows, retained for a long time its sepa- 
rate property, while its alderman — as the chief officer of each 



IV.] 



THE TSBEE EDWARDS. 



217 



(ruild was called — became the alderman of the united guild of 
the whole city. In Canterbuiy, we find a similar guild of thanes, 
from which the chief officers of the town seem commonly to have 
been selected. Imperfect, however, as the union might be, when 
once it was effected the town jDassed from a mere collection of 
brotherhoods into a powerful and organized community, Avhose 
character was inevitably determined by the circumstances of its 
origin. In their beginnings our boroughs seem to have been main- 
ly gatherings of persons engaged in agricultural pursuits; the first 
Dooms of London provide especially for the recovery of cattle 
belonging to the citizens. But as the increasing security of the 
country invited the farmer or the squire to settle apart in his own 
fields, and the growth of estate and trade told on the towns them- 
selves, the difference between town and country became more 
sharply defined. London, of course, took the lead in this new de- 
velopment of civic life. Even in Athelstan's day every London 
merchant who had made three long voyages on his own account 
ranked as a thane. Its " lithsmen," or shippers'-guild, were of 
sufficient importance under Hardicanute to figure in the election 
of a king, and its principal street still tells of the rapid growth of 
trade in the name of " Cheapside," or the bargaining place. But 
at the Norman Conquest the commercial tendency had become 
universal. The name given to the united brotherhood is in al- 
most every case no longer that of the " town-guild," but of the 
"merchant-guild." 

This social change in the character of the townsmen produced 
important results in the character of their municipal institutions. 
In becoming a merchant-guild, the body of citizens who formed 
the " town," enlarged their powers of civic legislation by apply- 
ing them to the control of their internal trade. It became their 
special business to obtain from the Crown, or from their lords, 
wider commercial privileges, rights of coinage, grants of fairs, and 
exemption from tolls ; while within the town itself they framed 
regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, the control of mar- 
kets, and the recovery of debts. A yet more important result 
sprang from the increase of population which the growth of wealth 
and industry brought with it. The mass of the new settlers, com- 
posed as they were of escaped serfs, of traders without landed hold- 
ings, of families who had lost their original lot in the borough, and 
generally of the artisans and the poor, had no part in the actual 
life of the town. The right of trade and of the regulation of trade, 
in common with all other forms of jurisdiction, lay wholly in the 
hands of the landed burghers whom we have described. By a nat- 
ural process, too, their superiority in wealth produced a fresh divis- 
ion between the "burghers" of the merchant-guild and the unen- 
franchised mass around them. The same change which severed at 
Florence the seven greater arts, or trades, from the fourteen less- 
er arts, and which raised the three occupations of banking, the 
manufacture and the dyeing of cloth to a position of superiority 
even within the privileged circle of the seven, told, though with 
less force, on the English boroughs. The burghers of the raer- 



218 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



chant-guild gradually concenti^ated themselves on the greater op- 
erations of commerce, on trades which required a larger capital, 
while the meaner employments of general traffic were abandoned 
to their poorer neighbors. This advance in the division of labor 
is marked by such severances as we note in the thirteenth centu- 
ry of the cloth merchant from the tailor, or the leather merchant 
from the butcher. But the result of this severance was all-impor- 
tant in its influence on the constitution of our towns. The mem- 
bers of the trades thus abandoned by the wealthier burghers form- 
ed themselves into craft-guilds, which soon rose into dangerous 
rivalry with the original merchant-guild of the town. A seven 
years' apprenticeship formed the necessary prelude to full member- 
ship of any trade-guild. Their regulations were of the minutest 
character; the quality and value of work were rigidly prescribed, 
the hours of toil fixed " from day-break to curfew," and strict pro- 
vision made against competition in labor. At each meeting of 
these guilds their members gathered round the craft-box, which 
contained the rules of their society, and stood with bared heads as 
it was opened. The Avarden and a quorum of guild-brothers form- 
ed a coui't which enforced the ordinances of the guild, inspected 
all work done by its members, or confiscated unlawful tools or un- 
Avorthy goods ; and disobedience to their orders was punished by 
fines, or in the last resort by expulsion, which involved the loss 
of right to trade. A common fund was raised by contributions 
among the members, Avhich not only provided for the trade ob- 
jects of the guild, but sufiiced to found chantries and masses, and 
erect painted windows in the church of tlieir patron saint. Even 
at the present day the arms of the craft-guild may often be seen 
blazoned in cathedrals side by side with those of prelates and of 
kings. But it was only by slow degrees that they rose to such 
eminence as this. The first steps in their existence were the most 
difficult, for to enable a trade-guild to carry out its objects with 
any success, it was necessary, first, that the whole body of crafts- 
men belonging to the trade should be compelled to belong to it, 
and secondly, that a legal control over the trade itself should be 
secured to it. A royal charter was indispensable for these pur- 
poses, and over the grant of these charters took place the first 
struggle with the merchant-guild, which had till then solely exer- 
cised jurisdiction over trade within the boroughs. The weavers, 
who were the first to secure royal sanction in the reign of Henry 
the First, were still engaged in the contest for existence as late as 
the reign of John, when the citizens of London bought for a time 
the suppression of their guild. Even under the house of Lancas- 
ter, Exeter Avas engaged in resisting tlie establishment of a tailor's 
guild. From the eleventh century, however, the spread of these 
societies went steadily on, and the control of trade passed from 
the merchant-guilds to the new craft-guilds. 

It is this struggle, to use the technical terms of the time, of the 
"greater folk" against the "lesser folk," or of the "commune," 
the general mass of the inhabitants, against the " prudhommes," 
or " wiser" few, Avhich brought about, as it passed from the regu- 



IV.] 



TRE THREE EDWARDS. 



219 



lation of trade to the general government of the town, the great 
civic revolution of the thirteenth and fourteentli centuries. On 
the Continent, and especially along the Rhine, the struggle was 
as fierce as the supremacy of the older burghers had been com- 
plete. In Koln the craftsmen had been reduced to all but serfage, 
and the merchant of Brussels might box at his will the ears of 
" the man without heart or honor who lives by his toil." Such 
social tyranny of class over class brought a century of bloodshed 
to the cities of Germany ; but in England the tyranny of class 
over class had been restrained by the general tenor of the law, 
and the revolution took for the most part a milder form. The 
longest and bitterest strife of all was naturally at London, Xo- 
where had the territorial constitution struck root so deeply, and 
nowhere had the landed oligarchy risen to such a height of wealth 
and influence. The city was divided into wards, each of which 
was governed by an alderman drawn from the ruling class. In 
some, indeed, the office seems to have become hereditary. The 
"magnates," or "barons," of the merchant-guild advised alone 
on all matters of civic government or trade regulation, and dis- 
tributed or assessed at their will the revenues or burdens of the 
town. Such a position afforded an opening for corruption and 
oppression of the most galling kind ; and it seems to have been 
the general impression of the unfairness of the assessment levied 
on the poor, and the undue burdens which were thrown on the 
unenfranchised classes, which provoked the first serious discon- 
tent. William of the Long Beard, himself one of the governing 
body, jDlaced himself at the head of a conspiracy which numbered, 
in the terrified fancy of the burghers, fifty thousand of the crafts- 
men. His eloquence, his bold defiance of the aldermen in the 
town-mote, gained him at any rate a wide popularity, and the 
crowds who surrounded him hailed him as " the savior of the 
poor." One of his addresses is luckily preserved to us by a hear- 
er of the time. In raediseval fashion he began with a text from 
the Vulgate, "Ye shall draw water with joy from the fountain of 
the Saviour." "I," he began, "am the savior of the poor. Ye 
poor men who have felt the weight of rich men's hands, draw from 
ray fountain waters of Avholesome instruction and that with joy, 
for the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the 
waters from the waters. It is the people who are the waters, and 
I will divide the lowly and faithful folk from the proud and faith- 
less folk ; I will part the chosen from the reprobate as light from 
darkness." But it was in vain that by appeals to the King he 
strove to wiu royal favor for the popular cause. The support of 
the moneyed classes was essential to Richard in the costly wars 
with Philip of France, and the Justiciary, Archbishoi^ Hubert, aft- 
er a moment of hesitation, issued orders for his arrest. William 
seized an axe and felled the first soldier who advanced to seize 
him, and taking refuge with a few adherents in the tower of Saint 
Mary-le-Bow, summoned his adherents to rise, Hubert, however, 
who had already flooded the city with troops, with bold contempt 
of the right of sanctuary set fire to the tower and forced William 



220 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



to surrender. A burgher's son, whose father he had slain, stabbed 
him as he came forth, and with his death the quarrel slumbered 
for more than fifty years. 

ISTo further movement, in fact, took place till the outbreak of 
the Barons' wars, but the city had all through the interval been 
seething Avith discontent; the unenfranchised craftsmen, under 
pretext of preserving the peace, had united in secret frith-guilds 
of their own, and mobs rose from time to time to sack the houses 
of foreigners and the wealthier burghers. But it was not till the 
civil war began that the open contest recommenced. The crafts- 
men forced their way into the town-mote, and setting aside the 
aldermen and magnates, chose Thomas-fitz-Thomas for their may- 
or. Although dissension still raged during the reign of the sec- 
ond Edward, Ave may regard this election as marking the final 
victory of the craft-guilds. Under his successor all contest seems 
to have ceased : charters had been granted to every trade, their 
ordinances formally recognized and enrolled in the mayor's court, 
and distinctive liveries assumed to which they owed the name of 
" Livery Companies," which they still retain. The wealthier citi- 
zens who found their old power broken, regained influence by en- 
rolling themselves as members of the trade-guilds, and Edward 
the Third himself humored the current of civic feeling by becom- 
ing a member of the guild of Armorers. This event marks ,the 
time when the government of our towns had become more really 
popular than it ever again became till the Municipal Reform Act 
of our own days. It had passed from the hands of an oligarchy 
into those of the middle classes, and there was nothing as yet to 
foretell the reactionary revolution by which the trade-guilds them- 
selves became an oligarchy as narrow as that which they had de- 
posed. 

Section V.— Tlie King amd the Baronage. 1290—1321'. 

[Authorities.— 'Fox Edward I. as before. For Edward II. we have three impor- 
tant contemporaiies : on the King's side, Thomas de la Moor (in Camden, "Anglica, 
Brittanica, etc.") ; on that of the barons, Trokelowe's Annals (published by the Mas- 
ter of the Rolls), and the Life by a monk of Malmesbury, printed by Hearne. The 
short Chronicle by Mmimuth is also contemporary in date. Hallam ("Middle 
Ages'") has illustrated the constitutional aspect of the time.] 



If we turn again to the constitutional history of England from 
the accession of Edward the First we find a progress not less real, 
but checkered with darker vicissitudes than the progress of our 
towns. Able as Edward undoubtedly was, he failed utterly to 
recognize the great transfer of power 'which had been brought 
about by the long struggle for the Charter, by the reforms o^Earl 
Simon, and by his own earlier legislation. His conception of king- 
ship was that of a just and religious Henry the Second, but his 
England was as different from the England of Henry as the Par- 
liament of the one was different from the Great Council of the 
other. In the rough rhymes of Robert of Gloucester we read the 
simple political creed of the people at large: 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



221 



"When the land through God's grace to good peace was brought 
For to have the old laws the high men turned their thought : 
For to have, as we said erst, the good old Law, 
The King made his charter and granted it with sawe." 

But the power which the Charter had wrested from the Crown 
fell not to the people, but to the baronage. The farmer and the 
artisan, though they could fight in some great crisis for freedom, 
had as yet no wish to interfere in the common task of government. 
The vast industrial change in both town and country, which had 
begun during the reign of Henry the Third, and which continued 
with increasing force during that of his son, absorbed the energy 
and attention of the trading classes. In agriculture, the inclosure 
of common lands and the introduction of the system of leases on 
the part of the great proprietors, coupled with the subdivision of 
estates which was facilitated by Edward's legislation, was grad- 
ually creating out of the masses of rural bondsmen a new class of 
tenant farmers, whose whole energy w^as absorbed in their own 
great rise to social freedom. The very causes which rendered the 
growth of municipal liberty so difficult, increased the wealth of 
the towns. To the trade with Norway and the Hanse towns of 
North Germany, the wool-trade with Flanders, and the wane trade 
with Gascony, was now added a fast increasing commerce with 
Italy and Spain. The great Venetian merchant galleys appeared 
on the English coast, Florentine traders settled in the southern 
ports, the bankers of Lucca followed those of Cahors, who had al- 
ready dealt a death-blow to the usury of the Jews. But the 
wealth and industrial energy of the country were shown, not only 
in the rise of a capitalist class, but in a crowd of civil and eccle- 
siastical buildings which distinguished this period. Christian ar- 
chitecture reached its highest beauty in the opening of Edward's 
reign, a period marked by the completion of the abbey ciiurch 
of Westminster and the exquisite cathedral church at Salisbury, 
The noble of the day was proud to be styled " an incomparable 
builder," while some traces of the art of Italy, which was just 
springing into life, flowed in with the Italian ecclesiastics whom 
the papacy was forcing on the English Church. In the abbey of 
Westminster the shrine of the Confessor, the mosaic pavem"ent, 
and the paintings on the walls of minster and chapter-house, re- 
mind us of the school which was about to spring up under Giotto. 

But even had this industrial distraction been wanting, the 
trading classes had no mind to claim any direct part in the actual 
work of government. It was a work which, in default of the 
Crown, fell naturally, according to the ideas of the time, to the 
baronage, and in the baronage the nation reposed an unwavering- 
trust. The nobles of England were no longer the brutal foreign- 
ers from whose violence the strong hand of the Norman sovereign 
had been needed to protect their subjects; they were as English 
as the peasant or the trader. They had won English liberty by 
their swords, and the popular trust in their fidelity to its cause 
was justified by the tradition of their order, which bound them to 
look on themselves as its natural guardians. Quietly, therefore, 



222 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



and by a natural process of political development, the probleni 
which Earl Simon had first dared to face, how to insure the gov- 
ernment of the realm in accordance with the charter, was solved 
as Simon had solved it, by the transfer of the business of adminis- 
tration into the hands of a standing committee of the greater prel- 
ates and barons, acting as the chief oflicers of state under the 
name of the Continual Council. The quiet government of the 
kingdom by this body in the interval between the death of Henry 
the Third and the return of Edward the First, if we contrast it 
with the disorders which had previously followed a king's decease, 
proved that the Crown was no longer the real depositary of po- 
litical power. In the brief indeed which announced Edward's ac- 
cession the Council asserted the crown to have devolved on the 
new monarch " by the will of the peers." At an earlier time the 
personal greatness of Edward might have redressed the balance, 
but the character of his legislation, as we have traced it in a for- 
mer page, and especially the oligarchical character of his land laws, 
shows the influence of the baronage to have remained practically 
supreme. The very form indeed of the new Parliament, in which 
the barons were backed by the knights of the shire, elected for 
the most part under their influence, and by the representatives of 
the towns, still true to the traditions of the Barons' war ; the in- 
creased frequency of these Parliarmentary assemblies which gave 
opportunity for counsel, for party organization, and a distinct po- 
litical base of action; above all, the new financial jjower which 
their control over taxation enabled them to exert on the throne, 
placed the rule of the nobles on a basis too strong to be shaken 
by the utmost efforts of even Edward himself. 

From the very outset of liis reign the King struggled fruitlessly 
against this over^Dowering influence. He was the last man to be 
content with a crown held " at the will of the peers," and his sym- 
pathies must have been stirred by the revolution on the other side 
the Channel, where the successors of St. Lewis were crushing the 
power of the feudal baronage and erecting a royal despotism on 
its ruins. He at once copied the French monarchs by issuing 
writs of "quo warranto," which required every noble to produce 
his titles to his estates. But the attack was roughly met. Earl 
Warrenne bared a rusty sword, and flung it on the commissioners' 
table. "This, sirs," said he, "is my title-deed. By the sword my 
fathers won their lands when they came over with the Conqueror, 
and by my sword I will hold them," The King dealt a harder 
blow at the baronage in his rigorous enforcement of public order. 
Different as the English nobles, were from the feudal noblesse of 
Germany and France, there is in every military class a tendency 
to outrage and violence, which even the stern justice of Edward 
found it difficult to repress. Great earls, such as those of Glouces- 
ter and Hereford, carried on private war along the Welsh march- 
es ; in Shropshire, the Earl of Arundel waged his feud with Fulk 
Fitz Warine. To the lesser nobles the Avealth of the trader, the 
long wain of goods as it passed along the highway, was a tempt- 
ing prey. Once, under cover of a mock tournament of monks 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWABDS. 



22[ 



ao-ainst canons, a band of country gentlemen sncceeded in intro- 
ducing themselves into the great merchant fair at Boston ; at 
nio-ht-fall every booth was on fire, the merchants robbed and 
slaughtered, and the booty carried off to ships which lay ready at 
the quay. Streams of gold and silver, ran the tale of popular hor- 
ror, flowed melted down the gutters to the sea; "all the money in 
England could hardly make good the loss." At the close of Ed- 
ward's reign lawless bands of " trail-bastons," or club-men, main- 
tained themselves by general outrage, aided the country nobles 
in their feuds, and wrested money and goods by threats from the 
great tradesmen. The King was strong enough to fine and im- 
prison the earls, to hang the chief of the Boston marauders, and to 
suppress the outlaws by rigorous commissions. But he had struck 
from his hands, by two widely different measures, his chief re- 
sources for a struggle with the barons when the Scotch war sud- 
denly placed him at their mercy. 

It was by the support of the lawyer class, by its hatred of the 
noblesse, by its introduction of the civil law and the doctrine of 
a royal despotism, that the French kings had trampled feudalism 
underfoot. In England so perfect was the national union, that 
the very judges were themselves necessarily drawn from the body 
of the lesser baronage. It was probably their uselessness for any 
purposes of royal aggression, quite as much as their personal cor- 
ruption, which Edward suddenly punished by a clean sweep of the 
bench. The Chief Justiciary was banished from the realm, and 
his colleagues imprisoned and fined. \Vhile his justice thus rob- 
bed him of the weapon of the law, fanaticism robbed him of the 
financial resource which had so often enabled his predecessors to 
confront their people. Under the Angevins the popular hatred of 
the Jews had grown rapidly in intensity. But the royal protec- 
tion had never wavered. Henry the Second had granted them 
the right of burial outside of every city where they dwelt. Rich- 
ard had punished heavily a massacre of the Jew^s at York, and he 
organized a mixed court of Jews and Christians for the registra- 
tion of their contracts. John suffered none to plunder them save 
himself, though he once wrested from them a sum equal to a year's 
revenue of his realm. But the very troubles of the time brought 
in a harvest greater than even the royal greed could reap; the 
Jews grew wealthy enough to acquire estates, and only a burst of 
popular feeling prevented a legal decision Avhich would have en- 
abled them to own freeholds, and rise to an equal citizenship with 
their Christian neighbors. Their pride and contempt of the super- 
stitions around them broke out in the taunts they leveled at pro- 
cessions as they passed their Jewries, sometimes as at Oxford in 
actual attacks upon them. Wild stories floated about among the 
people of children carried off to Jewish houses, to be circum- 
cised and crucified, and a boy of Lincoln who was found slain in a 
Jewish house was canonized by popular reverence as " St. Hugh." 
Fanaticism met fanaticism, and the first work of the friars was to 
settle in the Hebrew quarters and establish their convent-houses. 
But the tide of popular fury was rising too flist for these gentler 



224 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



means of reconciliation. When the Franciscans saved seventy- 
Jews from death by their prayers to the King the populace angrily 
refused the brethren alms. The sack of Jewry after Jewry was 
the sign of jjopular triumph during the Barons' war. With its 
close fell on the Jews the more terrible persecution of the law. 
Statute after statute hemmed them in. They were forbidden to 
hold real property, to employ Christian servants, to move through 
the streets without the colored tablet of wool on their breast 
which distinguished their race. They were prohibited from build- 
ing new synagogues, or eating with Christians, or acting as phj^si- 
cians to them. Their trade, already crippled by the rivalry of the 
bankers of Cahors, was annihilated by a royal order, which bade 
them renounce usury lander pain of death. At last persecution 
could do no more, and on thfe eve of his struggle with Scotland, 
Edward, eager for popular favor, and himself swayed by the fa- 
naticism of his subjects, ended the long agony of the Jews by 
their expulsion from the realm. Of the sixteen thousand who 
preferred exile to apostasy few reached the shores of France. 
Many were wrecked, others robbed and flung overboard. One 
ship-master turned a crew of wealthy merchants out on a sand- 
bank, and bade them call a new Moses to save them from the sea. 
From the time of Edward to that of Cromwell no Jew touched 
English ground. 

No share in the enormities which accompanied the expulsion of 
the Jews can fall upon Edward, for he not only suifered tlie fugi- 
tives to take their wealth with them, but punished with the halter 
those who plundered them at sea. But the expulsion was none 
the less a crime, and a crime for which punishment was quick to 
follow. The grant of a fifteenth made by the grateful Parliament 
proved but a poor substitute for the loss which the royal treasury 
had sustained. The demands of the Scotch war grew heavier day 
by day, and they were soon aggravated by the yet greater ex- 
penses of the French war which it entailed. It was sheer want 
which drove Edward to tyrannous extortion. His first blow fell 
on the Church ; he demanded half their annual income from the 
clergy, and so terrible was his wrath at their resistance, that the 
Dean of St, Paul's, who had stood forth to remonstrate, dropped 
dead of sheer terror at his feet. "If any oppose the King's de- 
mand," said a royal envoy, in the midst of the Convocation, "let 
him stand up, that he may be noted as an enemy to the King's 
peace." The outraged churchmen fell back on an untenable plea 
that their aid was due solely to Rome, and pleaded a bull of ex- 
emption, granted by Pope Boniface VIII., as a ground for refusing 
to comply with further taxation. Edward met their refusal by 
a general outlawry of the whole order. The King's courts wei'e 
closed, and all justice denied to those who refused the King aid. 
The clergy had, in fact, put themselves in the wrong, an^i the out- 
lawry soon forced them to submission, but their aid did little 
to recruit the exhausted treasury, while the pressure of the war 
steadily increased. Far wider measures of arbitrary taxation 
were needful to equip an expedition which Edward prepared to 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



lead in person to Flanders. The country gentlemen were com- 
pelled to take lip knighthood, or to compound for exemption from 
the burdensome honor. Forced contributions of cattle and corn 
were demanded from the counties, and the export duty on wool — 
now the staple produce of the country — was raised to six times 
its former amount. The work of the Great Charter and the Bar- 
ons' war seemed suddenly to have been undone, but the blow had 
no sooner been struck than Edward found himself powerless with- 
in his realm. The baronage roused itself to resistance, and the 
two greatest of the English nobles, Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and 
*Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, placed themselves at the head of the op- 
position. Their feudal tenures did not bind them to foreign serv- 
ice, and their protest against the war and the financial measures by 
which it was carried on took the practical form of a refusal to fol- 
low Edward to Flanders. " By God, Sir Earl," swore the King to 
Bohun, " you shall either go or hang !" " By God, Sir King," was 
the cool reply, "I will neither go nor hang !" Ere the Parliament 
he had convened could meet, Edward had discovered his own pow- 
erlessness, and, with one of those sudden revulsions of feeling of 
which his nature was capable, he stood before his people in West- 
minster Hall and owned, with a burst of tears, that he had taken 
their substance without due warrant of law. His passionate ap- 
peal to their loyalty wrested a reluctant assent to the prosecution 
of the war, but the crisis had taught the need of fui-ther securities 
against the royal power, and while Edward was still struggling 
in Flanders the Church and the Baronage drew together in their 
old alliance. The Primate, Winchelsey, joined the two earls and 
the citizens of London in forbidding any further levy of supplies, 
and in summoning a new Parliament, in which the Charter was not 
only confirmed, but new articles were added to it, prohibiting the 
King from raising taxes save by general consent of the realm. 
Edward hurried back from Flanders, but his struggles to evade a 
public ratification of the Charter, his attempt to add an evasive 
clause saving the right of the Crown, and the secret brief which 
he had procured from the Papacy annulling the statute altogether, 
only proved the bitterness of his humiliation. A direct threat of 
rebellion forced him to swear compliance with its provisions, and 
four years later a fresh gathering of the barons in arms wrested 
from him the full execution of the Charter of Forests. The suc- 
cesses gained over Scotland at the close of Edward's reign seemed 
for a moment to restore vigor to the royal authority ; but the fa- 
tal struggle revived in the rising of Robert Bruce, and the King's 
death bequeathed the contest to his worthless son. 

Worthless, however, as Edward the Second morally might be, 
he was far from being destitute of the intellectual power which 
seemed hereditary in the Plantagenets. It was his settled pur- 
pose to fling ofl" the yoke of the baronage, and the means by which 
he designed accomplishing his purpose was a ministry wholly de- 
pendent on the Crown. We have already noticed the change by 
which the "clerks of the King's chapel," who had been the minis- 
ters of arbitrary government under the Normans and Angevins, 

15 



226 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



had been quietly superseded by the prelates and lords of the Con- 
tinual Council, At the close of his father's reign, a direct demand 
on the part of the barons to nominate the great officers of state 
had been curtly rejected ; but the royal choice had been practi- 
cally limited in the selection of its ministers to the class of prel- 
ates and nobles, and, however closely connected with royalty, 
such officers always to a great extent shared the feelings and 
opinions of their order. It was the aim of the young King to 
undo the change which had been silently brought about, and to 
imitate the policy of the contemporary sovereigns of France by 
choosing as his ministers men of an inferior position, wholly de- 
pendent on the Crown for their power, and representatives of noth- 
ing but the policy and interests of their master. Piers Gaveston, 
a foreigner sprung from a family of Guienne, had been his friend 
and companion during his father's reign, at the close of which he 
had been banished from the realm for his sliare in intrigues which 
had divided Edward from his son. At the opening of the new 
reign he was at once recalled, created Earl of Cornwall, and placed 
at the head of the administration. Gay, genial, thriftless, Gaves- 
ton showed in his first acts the quickness and audacity of South- 
ern Gaul; the older ministers were dismissed, all claims of prece- 
dence or inheritance set aside in the distribution of officers at the 
coronation, while taunts and defiances goaded the proud baronage 
to fury. The fiivorite was a fine soldier, and his lance unhorsed 
his opponents in tourney after tourney. His reckless wit flung 
nicknames about the court; the Earl of Lancaster was "the Actor," 
Pembroke "the Jew," Warwick "the Black Dog." But taunt and 
defiance broke helplessly against the iron mass of the baronage. 
After a few months of power the formal demand of the Parlia- 
ment for his dismissal could not be resisted, and his exile was fol- 
lowed by the refusal of a grant of supply till redress had been 
granted for the grievances of which the Commons complained. 
The great principle on which the whole of our constitutional his- 
tory really hangs, that the redress of grievances should precede 
the grant of aid to the Crown, was established by Edward's re- 
luctant assent to the demand of the Parliament, and the great 
concession purchased Gaveston's return. His policy, however, 
was the same as before, and in a few months the barons were 
again in arms. The administrative revolution of the King was 
met by the revival of the bold measures of Earl Simon, and the 
appointment in full Parliament of a standing committee of bish- 
ops, earls, and barons, for the government of the realm during the 
coming year. A formidable list of "Articles of Reform" drawn 
up by these "Lords Ordainers" met Edward on his return from a 
fruitless warfare with the Scots, the most important of which re- 
lated to the constitution of the executive power. Parliaments 
were to be holden at least once a year; the consent of the baron- 
age assembled in them was required for a declaration of war or 
the King's departure from the realm, for the choice of all the 
great officers of the Crown, and of the wardens of the royal castles, 
while that of the sheriffs was left to the Continual Council whom 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



227 



tliey nominated. The demand was in fact one for a transfer of the 
King's authority into the hands of the baronage, for the part of the 
Commons in Parliament was still confined to the presentation of 
petitions of grievances and the grant of money, and it was only 
after a long and obstinate struggle that Edward was forced to 
compl}^ The exile of Gaveston was the sign of the barons' tri- 
umph ; his return a few months later renewed a strife which was 
only ended by his capture in Scarborough. The "Black Dog" 
of Warwick had sworn that the favorite should feel his teeth ; 
and Gaveston, who flung himself in vain at the feet of the Earl 
of Lancaster, praying for pity "from his gentle lord," was be- 
headed in defiance of the terms of his capitulation on Blacklow 
Hill. The King's burst of grief Avas as fruitless as his threats of 
vengeance ; a feigned submission of the conquerors completed 
the royal humiliation, and the barons knelt before Edward in 
Westminster Hall to receive a pardon which seemed the death- 
blow of the royal power. But if Edward was powerless to con- 
quer the baronage, he could still, by evading the observances 
of the ordinances, throw the whole realm into confusion. The 
six years that follow Gaveston's death are among the darkest in 
our history. A horrible succession of famines intensified the suf- 
fering which sprang from the utter absence of all rule during the 
dissension between the barons and the King. The overthrow of 
Bannockburn, and the ravages of the Scots in the North, brought 
shame on England such as it had never known. At last the cap- 
ture of Berwick by Robert Bruce forced Edward partially to give 
way, the ordinances were formally accepted, an amnesty granted, 
and a small number of jjeers belonging to the barons' party add- 
ed to the great ofiicers of state. 

The character of the Earl of Lancaster, who, by the union of 
the four earldoms of Lincoln, Leicester, Salisljury, and Derby 
with his own, as well as by his royal blood (for like the King 
he was a grandson of Henry the Third), stood at the head of 
the English bai*onage, and whom the issue of the long struggle 
with Edward raised for the moment to supreme power in the 
realm, seems to have fallen far beneath the greatness of his po- 
sition. Incapable of governing, he could do little but regard 
with jealousy the new favorite, originally one of his own depend- 
ents, whom Edward adopted. The rise of Hugh le Despenser, on 
Avhom the King had bestowed the county of Glamorgan with the 
hand of its heiress, was rapid enough to excite general jealousy, 
and Lancaster found little difficulty in extorting by force of arms 
his exile from the kingdom. But the tide of popular sympathy al- 
ready wavering was turned to the royal cause by an insult offered 
to the Queen, against whom Lady Badlesraere had closed the doors 
of her castle of Ledes, and the unexpected energy shown by Ed- 
Avard in avenging the insult gave fresh strength to his cause. He 
found himself strong enough to recall Despenser, and when Lan- 
caster convoked the baronage to force him again into exile, the 
weakness of his party was shown by the treasonable negotiatiens 
into which he entered with the Scots, and by his precipitate re- 



228 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chai-. 



treat to the North, on the advance of the royal army. At Bor- 
oughbridge, however, his forces were arrested and dispersed, and 
the Earl himself, brought captive before Edward at Pontefract, 
was ordered instantly to death as a traitor, "Have mercy on me, 
King of Heaven," cried Lancaster, as, mounted on a gray pony 
without a bridle, he was hurried to execution, " for my earthly 
king has forsaken me." His death was followed by that of a 
crowd of his adherents and by the captivity of the rest ; while a 
Parliament at York annulled the proceedings against Despenser, 
and repealed the greater pai't of the Ordinances. It is to this 
Parliament, however, and perhaps to the victorious confidence of 
the royalists, that we owe the famous provision that all laws con- 
cerning "the estate of the Crown or of the realm and people must 
be treated, accorded, and established in Parliament by the King, 
by and with the consent of the prelates, earls, barons, and uni- 
versality of the realm." There can be little doubt from the tenor 
of this remarkable enactment that much of the sudden revulsion 
of popular feeling had been owing to the assumption of all legis- 
lative action by the baronage alone. But the arrogance of Des- 
penser, the utter failure of a fresh campaign against Scotland, and 
the humiliating truce for fourteen years which Edward was forced 
to conclude with Robert Bruce, soon robbed the Crown of its tem- 
porary popularity, while Edward's domestic vices brought a,bout 
the sudden catastrophe which closed his disastrous reign. It had 
been arranged that the Queen, a sister of the King of France, 
should revisit her home to conclude a treaty between the two 
kingdoms, whose quarrel was again verging upon war, and his 
son, a boy of twelve years old, followed her to do homage in his 
father's stead for the duchy of Guienne. Neither threats nor 
prayers, however, could induce either wife or child to return, and 
the Queen's connection with the secret conspiracy of the baron- 
age was revealed when the primate and nobles hurried to her 
standard on her landing at Orwell. Deserted by all, and repulsed 
by the citizens of London, whose aid he had implored, the King 
fled hastily to the Marches of Wales and embarked with his fa- 
vorite for Lundy Isle ; but contrary winds flung the fugitives 
again on the Welsh coast, whei'e they fell into the hands of the 
new Earl of Lancaster. Despenser was at once hung on a gibbet 
fifty feet high, and the King placed in ward at Kenilworth till his 
fate could be decided by a Parliament summoned for that purpose 
at Westminster. The peers assembled, fearlessly revived the con- 
stitutional usage of the earlier English freedom, and asserted their 
right to depose a king who had proved himself unworthy to rule. 
Not a voice was raised in Edward's behalf, and only four prelates 
protested when the young Prince was proclaimed King by accla- 
mation, and presented as their sovereign to the multitudes with- 
out. The revolution soon took legal form in a bill which charged 
the captive monarch with indolence, incapacity, the loss of Scot- 
land, the violation of his coronation oath, and oppression of the 
CRurch and Baronage ; and on the approval of this it was resolved 
that the reign of Edward of Caernarvon had ceased and that the 



IV.] 



THE THREE EBWABDS. 



229 



crown had passed to his son, Edward of Windsor, A deputation 
of the Parliament proceeded to Kenilworth to procure the assent 
of the discrowned King to his own deposition, and Edward, "clad 
in a plain black gown," submitted quietly to his fate. Sir Wil- 
liam Trussel at once addressed him in words which better than 
any other mark the true nature of the step which the Parliament 
had taken. "I, William Trussel, proctor of the earls, barons, and 
others, having for this full and sufficient power, do render and 
give back to you, Edward, once King of England, the homage and 
fealty of the persons named in my procuracy; and acquit and dis- 
charge them thereof in the best manner that law and custom will 
give. And I now make protestation in their name that they will 
no longer be in your fealty and allegiance, nor claim to hold any 
thing of you as king, but will account you hereafter as a private 
person, without any manner of royal dignity." A significant act 
followed these emphatic words. Sir Francis Blount, the steward 
of the household, broke his staff of office, a ceremony only used at 
a king's death, and declared that all persons engaged in the royal 
service were discharged. 



Section VI.— The Scotcli TTar of Independence. 1306—1342. 

[Authorities. — Mainly the contemporary English Chroniclers and state documents 
for the reigns of the three Edwards. "The Bruce" of John Barbour is the great 
legendary store-house for the adventures of his hero : but its historical value may be 
measured by the fact that though born less than twenty years after the King's death 
he makes Bruce identical with his own grandfather. Mr. Burton's is throughout 
the best modern account of the time.] 



To obtain a clear view of the constitutional struggle between 
the kings and their baronage, we have deferred to its close an ac- 
count of the great contest which raged throughout the whole pe- 
riod in the North. 

With the Convention of Perth the conquest and settlement of 
Scotland seemed complete. Edward, in fact, was preparing for a 
joint Parliament of the two nations at Carlisle, when the conquer- 
ed country suddenly sprung again to arms under Robert Bruce, 
the grandson of one of the original claimants of the crown. The 
Norman house of Bruce formed a part of the Yorkshire baronage, 
but it had acquired through intermarriages the Earldom of Car- 
rick and the Lordship of Annandale. Both the claimant and his 
son had been pretty steadily on the English side in the contest 
with Balliol and Wallace, and Robert had himself been trained in 
the English Court, and stood high in the King's favor. But the 
withdrawal of Balliol gave a new force to his claims upon the 
crown, and the discovery of an intrigue which he had set on foot 
Avith the Bishop of St. Andrews so roused Edward's jealousy that 
Bruce fled for his life across the border. In the church of the 
Gray Friars at Dumfries he met Comyn, the Lord of Badenoch, to 
whose treachery he attributed the disclosure of his plans, and aft- 
er the interchange of a few hot words struck him with his das-aer 



Seo.VI. 

The Scotch 

Wae op 
Independ- 
ence. 

1306- 
1342. 



The 
Scotch re- 
volt. 



1305. 



130G. 



230 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



The Scotch 

Wak of 
Independ- 
ence. 



to the ground. It was an outrage that admitted of no forgive- 
ness, and Bruce for very safety was forced to assume the crown 
six weeks after in the Abbey of Scone. The news roused Scot- 
land again to arms, and summoned Edward to a fresh contest with 
his unconquerable foe. But the murder of Comyn had changed 
the King's mood to a terrible pitilessness ; he threatened death 
against all concerned in the outrage, and exposed the Countess 
of Buchan, who had set the crown on Bruce's head, in a cage or 
open chamber built for the purpose in one of the towers of Ber- 
wick. At the solemn feast which celebrated his son's knighthood 
Edward vowed on the swan, which formed the chief dish at the 
banquet, to -devote the rest of his days to exact vengeance from 
the murderer himself. But even at the moment of the vow, Bruce 
was already flying for bis life to the Highlands. "Henceforth," 
he had said to his wife at their coronation, " thou art Queen of 
Scotland and I King." "I fear," replied Mary Bruce, "we are 
only playing at royalty like children in their games." The play 
was soon turned into bitter earnest. A small English force un- 
der Aymer de Valence sufficed to rout the disorderly levies which 
had gathered round the new monarch, and the flight of Bruce left 
his followers at Edward's mercy. Noble after noble was hurried 
to the block. The Earl of Athole pleaded kindred with royalty: 
" H[is only privilege," burst forth the King, " shall be that of being 
hanged on a higher gallows than the rest." Knights and priests 
were strung up side by side by the English justiciaries; while the 
wife and daughtei's of Robert himself were flung into Edward's 
prisons. Bruce himself had ofiered to capitulate to Prince Ed- 
ward, but the ofler only roused the old King to fury. " Who is 
so bold," he cried, " as to treat with our traitors without our 
knowledge ?" and rising from his sick-bed he led his army north- 
ward to complete the conquest. But the hand of death was upon 
him, and in the very sight of Scotland the old man breathed his 
last at Burgh-upon-Sands. 

The abandonment of his great enterprise by Edward the Sec- 
ond, and the troubles which soon arose between the King and 
the English barons, were far at first from restoring the fortunes 
of Kobert Bruce. The Earl of Pembroke was still master of the 
open country, and the Highland chiefs of the West, among whom 
the new King was driven to seek for shelter, were bitterly hostile 
to the sovereign of the Lowland Scots. For four years Bruce's 
career was that of a desperate adventurer; but it was adversity 
which transformed the reckless murderer of Comyn into the noble 
leader of a nation's cause. Strong and of commanding presence, 
brave and genial in temper, Bruce bore the hardships of his ca- 
reer with a courage and hopefulness which never failed. In the 
legends which clustered round his name we see him listening in 
Highland glens to the bay of the blood-hounds on his track, or 
holding single-handed a pass against a crowd of savage clansmen. 
Sometimes the little band of fugitives were forced to support 
themselves by hunting or fishing, sometimes to break up for safe- 
ty as their enemies tracked them to their lair. Bruce himself had 



IV.] 



TSE THREE EDWARDS. 



231 



more than once to fling off his shirt of mail and scramble barefoot 
for his very life up the crags. Little by little, however, the dark 
sky cleared. The English pressure relaxed as the struggle be- 
tween Edward and his barons grew fiercer. James Douglas, the 
darling of Scotch story, was the first of the Lowland barons to 
rally again to the Bruce, and his daring gave heart to the royal 
cause. Once he surprised his own house, which had been given 
to an Englishman, ate the dinner which had been prepared for its 
new owner, slew his captives, and tossed their bodies on to a pile 
of wood gathered at the castle gate. Then he staved in the wine- 
vats, that the wine might mingle with their blood, and set house 
and wood-pile on fire. A terrible ferocity mingled with heroism 
in the work of freedom, but the work went steadily on. Bruce's 
" harrying of Buchan" after his defeat of its earl, who had joined 
the English in the North, at last fairly turned the tide of success. 
Edinburgh, Roxbui'gh, Perth, and most of the Scotch foi'tresses 
fell one by one into the King's hands. The clergy met in council 
and owned Bruce as their lawful lord. . Gradually the Scotch bar- 
ons who still held to the English cause were coerced into submis- 
sion, and Bruce found himself sti'ong enough to invest Stirling, 
the last and the most important of the Scotch fortresses which 
held out for Edward. 

Stirling was in fact the key of Scotland, and its danger roused 
England out of its civil strife to a vast effort for the recovery of 
its prey. Thirty thousand horsemen formed the fighting part of the 
great army which followed Edward to the North, and a host of 
wild marauders had been summoned from Ireland and Wales to 
its support. The army which Bruce had gathered to oppose the 
inroad was formed almost wholly of footmen, and was stationed 
to the south of Stirling on a rising ground flanked by a little 
brook, the Bannock burn, which gave its name to the engagement. 
Agam the two systems of warfare, the feudal and the free, were 
brought face to face, as they had been brought at Falkirk, and 
the King, like Wallace, drew up. his force in solid squares or cir- 
cles of spearmen. The English were dispirited at the very outset 
by the failure of an attempt to relieve Stirling, and by the issue 
of a single combat between Bruce and Henry de Bohun, a knight 
who had borne down upon him as he was riding peacefially along 
the front of his army. Robert Avas mounted on a small hackney, 
and held only a light battle-axe in his hand, but, warding off his 
opponent's spear, he cleft his skull with so terrible a blow that the 
handle of the axe was shattered in his grasp. At the opening of 
the battle the English archers were thrown forward to rake the 
Scottish squares ; but they were without support, and were easily 
dispersed by a handful of horse whom Bruce had held in reserve 
for the purpose. The great body of men at arms next flung them- 
selves on the Scottish front ; but their charge was embarrassed 
by the narrow space along which the line was forced to move, 
and the steady resistance of the squares soon threw the knight- 
hood into disorder. " The horses that were stickit," says an ex- 
ulting Scotch writer, " rushed and reeled right rudely." Li the 



232 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



moment of failure the sight of a body of camp-followers, Avhom 
they mistook for reinforcements to the enemy, sjDread panic through 
the English host. It broke in a headlong rout. The thousands 
of brilliant horsemen were soon floundering in pits which had 
guarded the level ground to Bruce's left, or riding in wild haste 
for the border. Few, however, were fortunate enough to reach it. 
Edward himself, with a body of five hundred knights, succeeded in 
escaping to Dunbar and the sea. But the flower of his knight- 
hood fell into the hands of the victors, while the Irishry and the 
footmen were ruthlessly cut down by the country folk as they fled. 
For centuries after, the rich plunder of the English camp left its 
traces on the treasure and vestment rolls of castle and abbey. 

Terrible as was the blow, it was long before England could re- 
linquish her claim on the Scottish crown. With equal pertinacity 
Bruce refused all negotiation while the royal title was refused to 
him, and steadily pushed on the recovery of the South. Berwick 
was at last forced to surrender, and held against a desperate at- 
tempt at its recapture ; while barbarous forays of the borderers un- 
der Douglas wasted Northumberland. Again the strife between 
the Crown and the Baronage w^as suspended to allow the march 
of a great English army to the North, but Bruce declined an en- 
gagement till the wasted Lowlands starved the invaders into a 
ruinous retreat. The blow wrested from England a truce for thir- 
teen years, in the negotiation of which Bruce was sufiered to t:ike 
the royal title ; but the deposition of Edward II. gave a fresh 
impulse to the ambition of the English baronage, and Edwai'd 
Balliol, the son of the former King, was solemnly received at the 
English Court. Robert was now on his death-bed, but the insult 
roused him to hurl his marauders again over the border, under 
Douglas and Randolph. Froissart paints for us the Scotch army 
as he saw it in this memorable campaign. " It consisted of four 
thousand men at arms, knights and esquires, well mounted, besides 
twenty thousand men bold and hardy, armed after the manner of 
their country, and mounted upon little hackneys that are never 
tied up or dressed, but turned immediately after the day's march 
to pasture on the heath or in the fields They bring no car- 
riages with them on account of the mountains they have to pass 
in ISTorthumberland, neither do they carry with them any provis- 
ions of bread or wine, for their habits of sobriety are such in time 
of war that they will live for a long time on flesh half sodden with- 
out bread, and drink the river water without wine. They have 
therefore no occasion for pots or pans, for they dress the flesh of 
the cattle in their skins after they have flayed them, and being sure 
to find plenty of them in the country which they invade, they carry 
none with them. Under the flaps of his saddle each man carries 
a broad piece of metal, behind him a little bag of oatmeal : when 
they have eaten too much of the sodden flesh and their stomachs 
appear weak and empty, they set this plate over the flre, knead 
the meal with water, and when the plate is hot put a little of the 
paste upon it and make a thin cake like a biscuit, which they eat 
to warm their stomachs. It is therefore no wonder that they per- 



IV-] 



THE THREE EDWABDS. 



233 



form a longer day's march than other soldiers." Against such 
a foe the heavy- armed knighthood of the English army, which 
marched under its boy-king to protect the border, was utterly 
helpless. At one time the army lost its way in the vast border 
waste ; at another, all traces of the enemy had disappeared, and an 
offer of knighthood and a hundred marks was made to any who 
could tell where the Scotch were encamped. But when found, 
their position behind the Wear proved unassailable, and after a 
bold sally on the English camp, Douglas foiled an attempt at 
blockading him by a clever retreat. The English levies broke 
hopelessly up, and a fresh foray on Northumberland forced the 
English Court to submit to peace. By the Treaty of Northamp- 
ton the independence of Scotland was formally recognized, and 
Bruce acknowledged as its king. 

The pride of England, however, had been too much aroused 
by the struggle to bear easily its defeat. The first result of the 
treaty was the overthrow of the Government which concluded it 
— a result hastened by the pride of its head, Roger Mortimer, and 
by his exclusion of the rest of the nobles from all share in the ad- 
ministration of the realm. The first efforts of the baronage were 
unsuccessful : the Earl of Lancaster, who had risen in revolt, was 
forced to submission ; and the King's uncle, the Earl of Kent, was 
actually brought to the block before the young King himself in- 
terfered in the struggle. Entering the council-chamber in Not- 
tingham Castle with a force which he had introduced through a 
secret passage in the rock on which it stands, Edward arrested 
Mortimer with his own hands, hurried him to execution, and as- 
sumed the control of affairs. His first care was to restore good \ 
oi'der throughout the country, which under the late Government 
had fallen into ruin, and to free his hands by a peace with France 
for the troubles which were again impending in the North. For- 
tune, indeed, seemed at last to have veered to the English side ; 
the death of Bruce only a year after the Treaty of Northampton 
left the Scottish throne to a child of eight years old, and the inter- 
nal difficulties of the realm broke out in civil strife. To the great 
barons on either side the border the late peace involved serious 
losses, for many of the Scotch houses held large estates in En- 
gland, as many of the English lords held large estates in Scot- 
land; and although the treaty had provided for their claims, they 
had in each case been practically set aside. It is this discontent 
of the barons at the new settlement which explains the sudden 
success of Edwai'd Balliol in his snatch at the Scottish throne. 
In spite of King Edward's prohibition, he sailed from England at 
the bead of a body of nobles who claimed estates in the North, 
landed on the shores of Fife, and, after repulsing with immense 
loss an army which attacked him near Perth, Avas crowned at 
Scone, while David Bruce fled helplessly to France. Edward had 
given no aid to the enterprise ; but the crisis tempted his ambi- 
tion, and he demanded and obtained from Balliol an acknowledg- 
ment of the abandoned suzerainty. Tlie acknowledgment, howev- 
er, was fatal to Balliol himself He was at once driven from his 



234 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sko. VI. 

The Scotch 

Wab op 
Inbepend- 

BNOE. 

1306- 
1342. 

1333. 



1339. 



realm, and Berwick, which he had agreed to surrender, was strong- 
ly garrisoned. The town was soon besieged; but a Scotch army 
under the regent Douglas, brother to the famous Sir James, ad- 
vanced to its relief, and attacked the covering force, which was 
encamped on the strong position of Halidon Hill. The English 
bowmen, however, vindicated the fame they had first won at Fal- 
kirk, and were soon to crown in the victory of Cressy ; and the 
Scotch only struggled through the marsh which covered the En- 
glish front, to be riddled with a storm of arrows, and to break in 
utter rout. The battle decided the fate of Berwick, and from that 
time the town remained the one part of Edward's conquests which 
was preserved by the English Crown. Fragment as it was, it was 
viewed legally as representing the realm of which it had once 
formed a part. As Scotland, it had its chancellor, chamberlain, 
and other officers of state; and the peculiar heading of acts of 
Parliament enacted for England " and the town of Berwick-upon- 
Tweed" still preserves the memory of its peculiar position. Bal- 
liol was restored to his throne by the conquerors, and his formal 
cession of the Lowlands to England rewarded their aid. During 
the next three years Edward persisted in the line of policy he had 
adopted, retaining his hold over Southern Scotland, and aiding his 
sub-king, Balliol, in campaign after campaign against the despair- 
ing efforts of the Douglases and other nobles who still adhered to 
the house of Bruce. His perseverance w^as all but crowned with 
success, when the outbreak of war with France saved Scotland by 
drawing the strength of England across the Channel. The patriot 
party drew again together. Balliol found himself at last without 
an adherent, and withdrew to the court of Edward, while David 
returned to his kingdom, and won back the chief fastnesses of the 
Lowlands. The freedom of Scotland was, in fact, secured. From 
a war of conquest and patriotic resistance, the struggle died into 
a petty strife between two angry neighbors, which became a mere 
episode in the larger contest between England and France. 



FRANCE AT THE TREATY OP BRBTIGNY 




v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



235 



CHAPTER y. 

THE HUNDBED YEARS' WAB. 

1336-1431. 

Section I.— Edward tlie Third. 1336—1360. 

[Authorities. — The concluding part of the chronicle of Walter of Heminburgh or 
Hemingford seems to have been jotted down as news of the passing events reached 
its author ; it ends on the vei-ge of Cressy. Another contemporary account, Robert 
of Avesbury's history of the "wonderful deeds of Edward the Third" to the year 
1356, has been. published by Hearne. A third by Knyghton, a canon of Leicester, 
will be found in Twysden's'" Decern Scriptores." At the close of this century and 
the beginning of the next the successive annals of the Abbey of St. Albans were 
thrown together by Walsinghara in the "Historia Anglicana" which bears his name, 
the history of whose compilation has been fully explained by Mr. Riley in the pref- 
aces to the "Chronica Monasterii St. Albani," published by the Master of the Rolls. 
The state documents and negotiations of the period will be found in the Foedera. 
For the French war itself our primary authority is the recently discovered chronicle 
of Jehan le Bel, a canon of St. Lambert of Lie'ge, who had himself served in Ed- 
ward's campaign against the Scots, and spent the rest of his Hfe at the Court of John 
ofHainault. (" Jehan le Bel, Chroniques." Edited by M.L. Polain, Brussels. 1863.) 
Up to the Treaty of Bretigny, where it closes, Froissart has done little more than 
copy this work, making, ho^vever, large additions from his own inquiries, especially in 
the Flemish and Breton campaigns and the account of Cressy. The history of Frois- 
sart's own work has lately been cleared up by Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove. A 
Hainaulter of Valenciennes, he held a post in Queen Phillippa's household from 1361 
to 1369 ; and under this influence produced in 1373 the first edition of his well- 
known chronicle. A later edition is far less English in tone, and a third version, 
begun by him in his old age after a long absence from England, is distinctly French 
in its sympathies. Froissart's vivacity and picturesqueness blind us to the inaccuracy 
of his details, but as an historical authority he is of no great value. The incidental 
mention of Cressy and the later English expeditions by Villani in his great Floren- 
tine Chronicle, are, on the other hand, of much importance. The best modern ac- 
count of this period is that by Mr. W. Longman, " History of Edward the Third.' 
Mr. Morley (" English Writers") has treated in great detail of Chaucer.] 



In the middle of the fouvteenth century the great movement to- 
ward freedom and unity which had begun under the last of the 
ISTorman kings seemed to have reached its end, and the perfect 
fusion of conquered and conquerors into an English people was 
marked by the disuse, even among the nobler classes, of the 
French tongue. In spite of the efforts of the grammar schools, 
and of the strength of fashion, English was winning its way 
throughout the reign of Edward the Third to its final triumph in 
that of his grandson, " Children in school," says a writer of the 
earlier reign, "against the usage and manner of all other nations, 
be compelled for to leave tlieir own language, and for to construe 
their lessons and their things in French, and so they have since 



236 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ISTormans first came into England. Also gentlemen's children be 
taught to speak French from the time that they be rocked in their 
cradle, and know how to speak and play with a child's toy ; and 
uplandish (or country) men will liken themselves to gentlemen, 
and fondell (or delight) with great busyness for to speak French 
to be told of." " This manner," adds a translator of Richard's 
time, " was much used before the first murrain (the plague of 
1349), and is since somewhat changed ; for John Cornewaile, a 
master of grammar, changed the lore in grammar school and con- 
struing from French into English; and Richard Pen criche learned 
this manner of teaching of him, as others did of Pencriche. So 
that now, the year of oui; Lord, 1385, and of the second King 
Richard after the conquest here, in all the grammar schools of 
England children learneth French, and construeth and learueth 
in English." A more formal note of the change thus indicated is 
found in the Statute of 1362, which orders English to be used in 
the pleadings of courts of law, because "the French tongue is 
much unknown." The tendency to a general use of the nation- 
al tongue told powerfully on literature. The influence of the 
French romances had every where tended to make French the one 
literary language at the opening of the fourteenth century, and 
in England this influence had been backed by the French tone of 
the court of Henry the Third and the three Edwards. But at the 
close of the reign of Edward the Third the long French romances 
were translated even for knightly hearers. " Let clerks indite in 
Latin," says the author of the "Testament of Love," "and let 
Frenchmen in their French also indite their quaint terms, for it is 
kindly to their mouths; and let us show our fantasies in such 
wordes as we learned of our mother's tongue." The new nation- 
al life afibrded nobler material than " fantasies" for English litera- 
ture. With the completion of the work of national unity had 
come the com2Dletion of the work of national freedom. Under the 
first Edward the Parliament had vindicated its right to the con- 
trol of taxation, under the second it had advanced from the re- 
moval of ministers to the deposition of a king, under the third it 
gave its voice on questions of peace and war, controlled expend- 
iture, and regulated the course of civil administration. The vig- 
or of English life showed itself socially in the wide extension of 
commerce ; in the rapid growth of the woolen manufactures after 
the settlement of Flemish weavers on the eastern coast ; in the 
progress of the towns, fresh as they were from the victory of the 
craft-guilds ; and in the development of agriculture through the 
rise of the tenant-farmer. It gave nobler signs of its activity in 
the spirit of national independence and moral eai-nestness which 
awoke at the call of Wyclif New forces of thought and feeling, 
which were destined to tell on every age of our later history, 
broke their way through the crust of feudalism in the socialist re- 
volt of the Lollards, and a sudden burst of military glory threw 
its glamour over the age of Cressy and Poitiers. 

It is this new gladness of a great people which utters itself in 
the verse of Geoffrey Chaucer. In spite of a thousand conjectures, 



v-i 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



237 



we know little of the life of our first great poet. From his own 
statement we gather that he was born about the middle of the 
fourteenth century. His death must have taken place about the 
year of its close. His family, though not noble, seems to have been 
of some importance, for, from the opening of his career, we find 
Chaucer in close connection with the Court. He first bore arms 
in the campaign of 1359, but he was luckless enough to be made 
prisoner ; and from the time of his release after the Treaty of Bre- 
tigny he took no further share in the military enterprises of his 
time. His marriage with a sister of the famous Katherine Swyn- 
ford, the mistress, and at a later time the wife, of John of Gaunt, 
identified him with the fortunes of the Duke of Lancaster ; it was 
as his adherent that he sat in the Parliament of 1386, and to his 
patronage that he owed a sinecure ofiice in the Customs and an 
appointment as clerk of the Royal Works. A mission, which was 
probably connected with the financial straits of the Crown, carried 
him in early life to Italy. He visited Genoa and the brilliant 
court of the Visconti at Milan; at Florence, where the memory of 
Dante, the " great master," whom he commemorates so reverently 
in his verse, was still living, he may ha^ve met Boccaccio ; at Padua, 
like his own clerk of Oxenford, he may have caught the story of 
Griseldis from the lips of Petrarca. But with these few facts and 
guesses our knowledge of him ends. In person, the portrait of 
Occleve, which preserves for us his forked beard, his dark-colored 
dress and hood, the knife and pen-case at his girdle, is supplement- 
ed by a few vivid touches of his own. The Host in the " Canter- 
bury Tales" describes him as one who looked on the ground as 
though he would find a hare, as elf-like in face, but portly of waist. 
He heard little of his neighbors' talk ; when labor was over " thou 
goest home to thine own house anon, and also dumb as a stone. 
Thou sittest at another book till fully dazed is thy look, and livest 
thus as an hermite, although thy abstinence is lite (little)." But 
of this abstraction from his fellows there is no trace in his verse. 
No poetry was ever more human than Chaucer's ; none ever came 
more frankly and genially home to its readers. The first note of 
his song is a note of freshness and gladness. " Of ditties and of 
songes glad, the which he for my sake made, the land fulfilled is 
over all," says the sober Gower, in his lifetime; and the impression 
of gladness remains just as fresh now that four hundred years have 
passed away. The historical character of Chaucei-'s work lies on 
its surface. It stands out in vivid contrast with the poetic litera- 
ture from the heart of which it sprang. The long French ro- 
mances were the product of an age of wealth and ease, of indolent 
curiosity, of a fanciful and self-indulgent sentiment. Of the great 
passions which gave life to the Middle Ages, that of religious en- 
thusiasm had degenerated into the pretty conceits of Mariolatry, 
that of war into the gorgeoiis extravagances of chivalry. Love, 
indeed, remained ; it was the one theme of troubadour and trou- 
veur ; but it was a love of refinement, of romantic follies, of scho- 
lastic discussions, of sensuous enjoyment — a plaything rather than 
a passion. Nature had to reflect the pleasant indolence of man ; 



238 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the song of the minstrel moved through a perpetual May-time ; 
the grass was ever green ; the music of the lark and the nightin- 
gale rang out from field and thicket. There was a gay avoidance 
of all that is serious, moral, or reflective in man's life : life was 
too amusing to be serious, too piquant, too sentimental, too full of 
interest and gayety and chat. It was an age of talk : " Mirth is 
none," says the Host, " to ride on by the way dumb as a stone ;" 
and the trouveur aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker 
of liis day. His romances, lais rhymes of King Horn or Sir Tris- 
tram, his "Romance of the Rose," are full of color and fantasy, end- 
less in detail, but with a sort of gorgeous idleness about their very 
length, the minuteness of their description of outer things, the 
vagueness of their touch when it passes to the subtler inner world. 
Nothing is more unreal than the tone of the French romance, noth- 
ing more absolutely real than the tone of Chaucer. If with the 
best modern critics we reject from the list of his genuine works the 
bulk of the poems which preceded " Troilus and Cressida," we see 
at once that, familiar as he was with the literature of the trou- 
veres, his real sympathies drew him not to the dying verse of 
France, but to the new and mighty upgrowth of poetry in Italy. 
Dante's eagle looks at him from the sun. " Fraunces Petrark, the 
laureat poete," is to him one " whose rethorique sweete enlumyned 
al Itail of poetrie." The " Troilus" is an enlarged English version 
of Boccaccio's "Filostrato," the "Knight's Tale" of his "Teseide." 
It was, indeed, the " Decameron" which suggested the very form of 
the " Canterbury Tales." But even while changing, as it were, the 
front of English poetry, Chaucer preserves his own distinct person- 
ality. If he quizzes in the rhyme of Sir Thopaz the wearisome idle- 
ness of the French romance, he retains all that was worth retain- 
ing of the French temper, its rapidity and agility of movement, its 
lightness and brilliancy of touch, its airy mockery, its gayety and 
good-humor, its critical coolness and self-control. The French wit 
quickens in him more than in anyEnglish writer the sturdy sense and 
shrewdness of our national disposition, corrects its extravagance, 
and relieves its somewhat ponderous morality. K, on the other 
hand, he echoes the joyous carelessness of the Italian tale, he tem- 
pers it with the English seriousness. As he follows Boccaccio, all 
his changes are on the side of purity; and w^hen the "Troilus" of 
the Florentine ends with the old sneer at the changeableness of 
woman, Chaucer bids us " look Godward," and dwells on the un- 
changeableness of heaven. 

But the genius of Chaucer was neither French nor Italian, what- 
ever element it might borrow from either litei-ature, but English 
to the core. Of the history of the great poem on which his fame 
must rest, or of the order in which the " Canterbury Tales" were 
really written, we know nothing. The work was the fruit of his 
old age : it was in his last home, the house in the garden of St. 
Mary's Chapel at Westminster, that Chaucer rested from his la- 
bors ; and here he must have been engaged on the poem which 
his death left unfinished. Its story — that of a pilgrimage from 
London to Canterbury — not only enabled him to string together 



v.] 



TRE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



239 



a numbei* of tales which seem to have been composed at very dif- 
ferent times, but lent itself admirably to the peculiar characteris- 
tics of his poetic temper, dramatic power, and the universality of 
his sympathy. His tales cover the whole field of mediaeval poetry ; 
the legend of the priest, the knightly romance, the wonder-tale of 
the traveler, the broad humor of the fabliau, allegory, and apo- 
loo-ue, all are there. He finds a yet wider scope for his genius in 
the persons who tell these stories, the thirty pilgrims who start 
in the May morning from the Tabard in Southwark — thirty dis- 
tinct figures, representatives of every class of English society, 
from the noble to the plowman. We see the "verray perfight 
gentil knight" in cassock and coat of mail, with his curly-headed 
squire beside him, fresh as the May morning, and behind them the 
brown-faced yeoman, in his coat and hood of green, with the good 
bow in his hand. A group of ecclesiastics lights up for us the 
mediaeval church — the brawny hunt-loving monk, whose bridle 
jingles as loud and clear as the chapel-bell — the wanton friar, first 
among the beggars and harpers of the country-side — the poor par- 
son, threadbare, learned, and devout ("Christ's lore and His apos- 
tles' twelve he taught, and first he followed it himself") — the 
summoner with his fiery face — the pardoner with his wallet " bret- 
full of pardons, come from Rome all hot" — the lively prioress with 
her courtly French lisp, her soft little red mouth, and "Amor vin- 
cit omnia" graven on her brooch. Learning is there in the iDortly 
person of the doctor of law, rich with the profits of the pestilence 
— the busy sergeant of law, " that ever seemed busier than he 
was"— the hollow-cheeked clerk of Oxford, with his love of books, 
and short, sharp sentences that disguise a latent tenderness which 
breaks out at last in the story of Griseldis. Around them crowd 
types of English industry : the merchant ; the franklin, in whose 
house "it snowed of meat and drink;" the sailor fresh from frays 
in the Channel; the buxom wife of Bath; the broad-shouldered 
miller ; the haberdasher, carpenter, weaver, dyer, tapestry-maker, 
each in the new livery of his craft ; and last, the honest plowman, 
who would dike and delve for the poor without hire. It is the 
first time in English poetry that we are brought face to face not 
with characters or allegories or reminiscences of the past, but 
with living and breathing men, men distinct in temper and senti- 
ment as in face or costume or mode of S23eech; and with this dis- 
tinctness of each maintained throughout the story by a thousand 
shades of expression and action. It is the first time, too, that we 
meet with the dramatic power which not only creates each char- 
acter, but combines it with its fellows, which not only adjusts each 
tale or jest to the temper of the person who utters it, but fuses all 
into a poetic unity. It is life in its largeness, its variety, its com- 
plexity, which surrounds us in the "Canterbury Tales." In some 
of the stories, indeed, composed no doubt at an earlier time, there 
is the tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the school- 
man ; but taken as a whole the poem is the work not of a man of 
letters, but of a man of action. He has received his training from 
war, courts, business, travel — a training not of books, but of life. 



240 



SISTOBY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



And it is life that he loves — the delicacy of its sentiment, the 
breadth of its farce, its laughter and its tears, the tenderness of 
its Griseldis, or the Smollett-like adventures of the miller and the 
school- boy. It is this largeness of heart, this wide tolerance, 
Avhich enables him to reflect man for us as none but Shakspeare 
has ever reflected him, but to reflect him with a pathos, a shrewd 
sense and kindly humor, a freshness and joyousness of feeling, 
that even Shakspeare has not surpassed. 

It is strange that such a voice as this should have awakened no 
echo in the singers who follow ; but the first burst of English song 
died as suddenly and utterly with Chaucer as the hope and glory 
of his age. The hundred years Avhich follow the brief sunshine 
of Cressy and the " Canterbury Tales" are years of the deepest 
gloom ; no age of our history is so sad and sombre as the age 
which we traverse from the third Edward to Joan of Arc. The 
throb of hope and glory which pulsed at its outset through every 
class of English society died into inaction or despair. Material 
life lingered on indeed, commerce still widened, but its progress 
was dissociated from all the nobler elements of national well-being. 
The towns sank again into close oligarchies; the bondsmen strug- 
gling forward to freedom fell back into a serfage which still leaves 
its trace on the soil. Literature reached its lowest ebb. The re- 
ligious revival of the Lollards was trodden out in blood, while the 
Church shriveled into a self-seeking secular priesthood. In the 
clash of civil strife political freedom was all but extinguished, and 
the age which began with the Good Parliament ended with the 
despotism of the Tudors. , 

The secret of the change is to be found in the fatal war which 
for more than a hundred years drained the strength and corrupt- 
ed the temper of the English people. We have followed the at- 
tack on Scotland to its disastrous close, but the struggle ere it 
ended had involved England in a second contest, to which, for 
the sake of clearness, we have only slightly alluded, but to which 
we must now turn back, a contest yet more ruinous than that 
which Edward the First had begun. From the war with Scot- 
land sprang the hundred years' struggle with France. From the 
first, France had watched the successes of her rival in the North, 
partly with a natural jealousy, but still more as likely to afibrd 
her an opening for winning the great southern Duchy of Guienne 
— the one fragment of Eleanor's inheritance which remained to 
her descendants. Scotland had no sooner begun to resent the 
claims of her overlord, Edward the First, than a pretext for in- 
terference was found in the rivalry between the mariners of Nor- 
mandy and those of the Cinque Ports, which culminated at the 
moment in a great sea-fight that proved fatal to 8000 Frenchmen. 
So eager was Edward to avert a quarrel with France, that his 
threats roused the English seamen to a characteristic defiance. 
" Be the King's counsel well advised," ran the remonstrance of 
the mariners, " that if wrong or grievance be done them in any 
fashion against right, they will sooner forsake wives, children, and 
all that they have and go seek through the seas where they shall 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



241 



tliink to make their profit." In spite, therefore, of Edward's ef- 
forts the contest continued, and Philip found an opportunity to 
cite the King- before his court at Paris for wrongs done to his su- 
zerain. Again Edward endeavored to avert the conflict by a form- 
al cession of Guienne into Philip's hands during forty days, but 
the refusal of the French sovereign to restore the pi'ovince left no 
choice for him but war. The instant revolt of Balliol proved that 
the French outrage was but the first blow in a deliberate and 
long-planned scheme of attack ; Edward had for a while no force 
to waste on France, and when the first conquest of Scotland freed 
his hands, his league with Flanders for the recovery of Guienne 
was foiled by the refusal of his baronage to follow him on a for- 
eign campaign. Even after the victory of Falkirk, Scotch inde- 
pendence was still saved, as we have seen, for three years by the 
threats of France and the intervention of its ally, Boniface the 
Eighth ; and it Avas only the quarrel of these two confederates 
which allowed Edward to complete its subjection. But the rising 
under Bruce was again backed by French aid and by the renewal 
of the old quarrel over Guienne — a quarrel which hampered En- 
gland through the reign of Edward the Second, and which indi- 
rectly brought about his terrible fall. The accession of Edward 
the Third secured a momentary peace, but the fresh attack on 
Scotland which mai-ked the opening of his reign kindled hostility 
anew: the young King David found refuge in France, and arms, 
money, and men were dispatched from its ports to support his 
cause. It was this intervention of France which foiled Edward's 
hopes of the submission of Scotland at the very moment when 
success seemed in his grasp; the solemn announcement by Charles 
of Valois that his treaties bound him to give effective help to his 
old ally, and the assembly of a French fleet in the Channel, drew 
the King from his struggle in the North to face a storm which his 
negotiations could no longer avert. 

The two weapons on which Edward counted for success at the 
opening of the contest thus forced on him were the wealth of En- 
gland and his claim upon the crown of France. The commerce 
of the country was still mainly limited to the exportation of wool 
to Flanders, but the rapid rise of this trade may be conjectured 
from the fact that in a single year Edward received more than 
£80,000 from duties levied on wool alone. So fine Avas the breed 
of sheep, that the exportation of live rams for the improvement of 
foreign wool was forbidden by law, though a flock is said to have 
been smuggled out of the realm shortly after, and to have become 
the source of the famous merinos of Spain. IJp to Edward's time 
few woolen fabrics seem to have been woven in England, though 
Flemish weavers had come over with the Conqueror to found the 
prosperity of Norwich ; but the number of weavers' guilds shows 
that the trade was gradually extending. Edward appears to have 
taken it under his especial care; at the outset of his reign he in- 
vited Flemish weavers to settle in his country, and took the new 
immigrants, who chose principally Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex for 
the seat of their trade, under his especial protection. It was on 

16 



242 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the wealth which England derived from the great development of 
its commerce that the King relied in the promotion of a great 
league with Flanders and the Empire, by which he proposed to 
bring the French war to an end. Anticipating the later poli- 
cy of Godolphin and Pitt, Edward became the pay-master of the 
poorer princes of Germany; his subsidies purchased the aid of 
Hainault, Gueldres, and Juliers ; sixty thousand crowns went to 
the Duke of Brabant, while the Emperor himself was induced 
by a promise of 3000 gold florins to furnish 2000 men at arms. 
Years, however, of elaborate negotiations and profuse expendi- 
ture brought the King little fruit save the title of Vicar-General 
of the Empire on the left of the Rhine. Now the Flemings hung 
back, now his imperial allies refused to move without the Emper- 
or's express consent ; and when the host at last crossed the bor- 
der Edward found it impossible to bring the French King to an 
engagement. Philip, meanwhile, was busy in sweeping the Chan- 
nel and harrying the shores of England ; and his threats of inva- 
sion were only averted by a naval victory off the Flemish coast, in 
which Edward in person utterly destroyed for the time the fleet 
of France. The King's difiiculties, however, had at last reached 
their height. His loans from the great bankers of Florence 
amounted to half a million of our money; his overtures for peace 
were contemptuously rejected ; his claim to the French crown 
found not a single adherent. To establish such a claim, indeed, 
was diflicult enough. The three sons of Philip le Bel had died 
without male issue, and Edward claimed as the son of Philip's 
daughter Isabella. But though her brothers had left no sons, 
they had left daughters ; and if female succession were admitted, 
these daughters of Philip's sons would precede the son of Philip's 
daughter. If, on the other hand, as the great bulk of French ju- 
rists asserted, only male succession gave right to the thi'one, then 
the right of Philip le Bel was exhausted, and the crown passed to 
the son of his brother Charles, who had in fact peacefully succeed- 
ed to it as Charles of Valois. By a legal subtlety, however, while 
asserting the rights of female succession" and of the line of Philip 
le Bel, Edward alleged that the nearest living male descendant of 
that king could claim in preference to females who were related 
to him in as near a degree. Though advanced on the accession 
of Charles of Valois, the claim seems to have been regarded on 
both sides as a mere formality ; Edward, in fact, did full and liege 
homage to his rival for his Duchy of Guienne ; and it was not till 
his hopes from Germany had been exhausted, and his claim was 
found to be useful in securing the loyal aid of the Flemish cities, 
that it was brought seriously to the front. But a fresh campaign 
in the Low Countries was as fruitless as its predecessors, and the 
ruin of the English party in Flanders, through the death of its 
chief. Van Arteveld, was poorly compensated by a new opening 
for attack in Brittany, where, of the two rival claimants to the 
duchy, one did homage to Philip and the other to Edward. 

The failure of his foreign hopes threw Edward on the resources 
of England itself, and it was with an army of thirty thousand men 



v.] 



TRE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



243 



that he landed at La Hogue, and commenced a march which was 
to change the whole face of tlie war. His aim was simply to ad- 
vance ravaging to the north, where he designed to form a junction 
with a Flemish force gathered at Gravelines; but the rivers be- 
tween them were carefully guarded, and it was only by throwing 
a bridge across the Seine at Poissy, and by forcing the ford of 
Blanche-Tete on the Sorame, that Edward escaped the necessity 
of surrendering to the vast host which was hastening in pursuit. 
His communications, however, were no sooner secured than he 
halted at the little village of Cressy in Ponthieu, and resolved to 
give battle. Half of his army, now greatly reduced in strength, 
consisted of the light-armed footmen of Ireland and Wales ; the 
bulk of the remainder was composed of English bowmen. The 
King ordered his men at arms to dismount, and drew up his forces 
on a low rise sloping gently to the south-east, with a windmill on 
its summit from which he could overlook the whole field of bat- 
tle. Immediately beneath him lay the reserve, while at the base 
of the slope was placed the main body of the army in two divis- 
ions, that to the right commanded by the young Prince of Wales, 
that to the left by the Earl of Northampton. A small ditch pro- 
tected the English front, and behind it the bowmen were drawn 
up "in the form of a harrow," with small bombards between them 
" which, with fire, threw little iron balls to frighten the horses" — 
the first instance of the use of artillery in field warfare. The halt 
of the English army took Philip by surprise, and he attempted for 
a time to check the advance of his army, but the disorderly host 
rolled on to the English front. The sight of his enemies, indeed, 
stirred the King's own blood to fury, "for he hated them," and at 
vespers the fight began. Fifteen thousand Genoese cross-bowmen, 
hired from among the soldiers of the Lord of Monaco, on the sun- 
ny Riviei'a, were ordered to begin the attack. The men were 
weary with the march ; a sudden storm wetted and rendered use- 
less their bowstrings ; and the loud shouts with which they leaped 
forward to the encounter were met with dogged silence in the En- 
glish ranks. Their first aiTow-flight, however, brought a terrible 
reply. So rapid was the English shot, " that it seemed as if it 
snowed." "Kill me these scoundrels," shouted Philip, as the Gen- 
oese fell back; and his men at arms plunged butchering into their 
broken ranks, while the Counts of Alen9on and Flanders, at the 
head of the French knighthood, fell hotly on the Prince's line. 
For the instant his small force seemed lost, but Edward refused 
to send him aid. " Is he dead or unhorsed, or so wounded that he 
can not help himself?" he asked the envo3^ "No, sir," was the 
reply, "but he is in a hard passage of arms, and sorely needs your 
help." "Return to those that sent you, Sir Thomas," said the 
King, " and bid them not send to me again so long as my son 
lives ! Let the boy Avin his spurs ; for I wish, if God so order it, 
that the day may be his, and that the honor may be with him and 
them to whom I have given it in charge." Edward could see, 
in fact, from his higher ground, that all went well. The bowmen 
and men at arras held their ground stoutly, while the Welshmen 



244 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



were stabbing the horses in the melee, and bringing knight after 
knight to the ground. Soon the great French host was wavering 
in a fatal confusion. " You are n\j a- assals, my friends," cried the 
blind King of Bohemia, who had joined Philip's army, to the no- 
bles around him ; " I pray and beseech you to lead me so far into 
the fight that I may strike one good blow with this sword of 
mine !" Linking their bridles together, the little company plunged 
into the thick of the combat to fall as their fellows were falling. 
The battle went steadily against the French : at last Philip him- 
self hurried from the field, and the defeat became a rout; 1200 
knights and 30,000 footmen — a number equal to the whole En- 
glish force — lay dead upon the ground. 

" God has punished us for our sins," cries the chronicler of St. 
Denys, in a passion of bewildered grief, as he tells the I'out of the 
great host which he had seen mustering beneath his abbey walls. 
But the fall of France was hardly so sudden or so incomprehensi- 
ble then as the fall of chivalry. The lesson which England had 
learned at Bannockburn she taught the world at Cressy. The 
whole social and political fabi'ic of the Middle Ages rested on a 
military base, and its base was suddenly withdrawn. The churl 
had struck down the noble; the bondsman proved more than a 
match in sheer hard fighting for the knight. From the day of 
Cressy feudalism tottered slowly but surely to its grave. But to 
England the day was the beginning of a career of military glory, 
which, fatal as it was destined to prove to the higher sentiments 
and interests of the nation, gave it for the moment an energy such 
as it had never known before. Victory followed victor}^. A few 
months after Cressy a Scotch army which had burst into the North 
was routed at Neville's Cross, and its king, David, taken prisoner; 
while the withdrawal of the French from the Garonne left England 
unopposed in Guienne and Poitou. Edward's aim, however, was 
not to conquer France, but simply to save English commerce by 
securing the mastery of the Channel. Calais was the great pirate 
haven ; in one year alone twentj'^-two privateers had sailed from its 
port; while its capture promised the King an easy base of com- 
munication with Flanders, and of operations against France. The 
siege lasted a year, and it was not till Philip had. failed to relievo 
it that the town was starved into surrender. Mercy was grant- 
ed to the garrison and the people on condition that six of the 
citizens gave themselves unconditionally into the King's hands. 
" On them," said Edward, with a burst of bitter hatred, " I will do 
my will." At the sound of the town bell, Jehan le Bel tells us, 
the folk of Calais gathered round the bearer of these terms, " de- 
siring to hear their good news, for they were all mad with hun- 
ger. When the said knight told them his news, then began they 
to weep and cry so loudly that it was great pity. Then stood up 
the wealthiest burgess of the town, Master Eustache de St. Pierre 
by name, and spake thus before all : ' My masters, great grief and 
mishap it were for all to leave such a people as this is to die by 
fiimine or otherwise; and great charity and grace would he win 
1 from our Lord who could defend them from dying. For me, I 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED TEARS' WAR. 



245 



liave great hope in the Lord that if I can saA'e this people by my 
death, I shall have pardon for my faults ; wherefore will I be the 
first of the six, and of my own will put myself barefoot in my 
shirt and with a halter round my neck in the mercy of King Ed- 
ward.'" The list of devoted men was soon made up, and the 
six victims were led before the King. "All the host assembled 
together; there was great press, and many bade hang them 
openly, and many wept for pit3^ The noble King came with 
his train of counts and barons to the place, and the Queen fol- 
lowed him, though great with child, to see what there would 
be. The six citizens knelt down at once before the King, and 
Master Eustache said thus : ' Gentle King, here we be six who 
.have been of the old bourgeoisie of Calais and great merchants; 
Ave bring you the keys of tlie town and castle of Calais, and ren- 
der them to you at your pleasure. We set ourselves in such wise 
as you see purely at your will, to save the remnant of the people 
that has sutfered much pain. So may you have pity and mercy 
on us for your high nobleness' sake.' Certes, there was then in 
that place neither lord nor knight that wept not for pity, nor who 
could speak for pity; but the King had his heart so hardened by 
wrath, that for a long while he could not reply ; then he command- 
ed to cut off their heads. All the knights and lords prayed him 
with tears, as much as they could, to have pity on them, but he 
would not hear. Then spoke the gentle knight, Master Walter de 
Manny, and said, 'Ha, gentle sire ! bridle your wrath ; you have the 
renown and good fame of all gentleness; do not a thing whereby 
men can speak any villainy of you ! If you have no pity, all men 
will say that you have a heart full of all cruelty to put these good 
citizens to death that of their own Avill are come to render them- 
selves to you to save the remnant of their people.' At this point 
the King changed countenance with Avrath, and said, ' Hold your 
peace. Master Walter ! it shall be none otherwise. Call the heads- 
man ! They of Calais have made so many of my men die, that 
they must die tliemselves !' Tlien did the noble Queen of England 
a deed of noble lowliness, seeing she was great with child, and 
wept so tenderly for pity that she could no longer stand upright; 
therefore she cast herself on her knees before her lord the King, 
and spake on this wise : 'Ah, gentle sire ! from the day that I 
passed over-sea in great peril, as you know, I have asked for noth- 
ing: now pray I and beseech you, with folded hands, for the love 
of our Lady's Son, to have mercy upon them.' The gentle King 
waited a while before speaking, and looked on the Queen as she 
knelt before him bitterly weeping. Then began his heart to soft- 
en a little, and he said, 'Lady, I would rather you had been other- 
where; you pray so tenderly that I dare not refuse you; and 
though I do it against my will, nevertheless take them, I give 
them you,' Then took he the six citizens by the halters and de- 
livered them to the Queen, and released from death all those of 
Calais for the love of her; and the good lady bade them clothe 
the six burgesses and make them good cheer," 

A great naval victory w^on over a Spanish pirate fleet which 



246 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sko. I. 

Edwaed 

tub tuiku. 

1336. 

1360. 



134T— 1355. 



Poitiers. 
Si'pt. 10, 1356. 



was sweeping the narrow seas completed the work which had be- 
gun with the capture of Calais. In Froissart's naval pictui'e we 
see the King sitting on deck in his jacket of black velvet, his head 
covered with a black beaver hat which became him well, and call- 
ing on his minstrels to play to him on the horn, and on John 
Chandos to troll out the songs he has brought over from Ger- 
many, till the great Spanish ships heave in sight, and a furious 
struggle begins which ends in their destruction. Edward was 
now "King of the Sea," but peace with France was as far off as 
ever. Even the truce which had for eight years been forced 
on both countries by sheer exhaustion became at last impossible. 
Edward threw three armies at once on the French coast, but the 
campaign proved a fruitless one. The "Black Prince," as the 
hero of Cressy was now styled, alone won a distinguished success. 
Nortliern and Central France had by this time fallen into utter 
ruin ; the royal treasury was empty, the fortresses unoccupied, 
the ti'oops disbanded for want of pay, the country swept by ban- 
dits. Onlj^ the South remained at j^eace, and the young Prince 
led his army of freebooters up the Garonne into "wliat was before 
one of the fat countries of the world, the people good and sim- 
ple, who did not know what war was ; indeed, no war had been 
waged against them till the Prince came. The English and Gas- 
cons found the country full and gay, the rooms adorned with<car- 
pets and draperies, the caskets and chests full of fair jewels. But 
nothing was safe from these robbers. They, and especially the 
Gascons, who are very greedy, carried off every thing." The cap- 
tain of Narbonne loaded them with booty, and they fell back to 
Bordeaux, " their horses so laden with spoil that they could hard- 
ly move." With the same aim of plunder, the Black Prince 
started the next year for the Loire ; but the assembly of a French 
army under John, who had succeeded Philip of Valois on the 
throne, forced him to retreat. As he approached Poitiers, how- 
ever, he found the French, who now numbered 60,000 men, in his 
path. The Prince at once took a strong position in the fields of 
Maupertuis, his front covered by thick hedges, and approachable 
only by a deep and narrow lane which ran between vineyards. 
The Prince lined the vineyards and hedges with bowmen, and 
drew up his small body of men at arms at the point where the 
lane opened upon the higher plain where he was encamped. His 
force numbered only 8000 men, and the danger was great enough 
to force him to offer the surrender of his prisoners, and an oath 
not to fight against France for seven years, in exchange for a free 
retreat. The terms were rejected, and three hundred French 
knights charged up the narrow lane. It was soon choked with 
men and horses, while the front ranks of the advancing army fell 
back before the galling fire of arrows from the hedgerows. In 
the moment of confusion a body of English horsemen, posted on a 
hill to the right, charged suddenly on the French flank, and the 
Prince seized the opportunity to fall boldly on their front. The 
English archery completed the disorder produced by this sudden 
attack; the French King was taken, desperately fighting; and at 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



noontide, when his army poured back in utter rout to the gates 
of Poitiers, 8000 of their number had fallen on the field, 3000 in 
the flight, and 2000 men at arras, with a crowd of nobles, were 
taken prisoners. The royal captive was led in triumph into Lon- 
don, and a truce for two years seemed to give healing -time to 
France. But the miserable country found no rest in itself. The 
routed soldiery turned into free companies of bandits, while the 
captive lords purchased their ransom by extortion which drove 
the peasantry into universal revolt. "Jacques Bonhomme," as 
the insurgents called themselves, waged war against the castles; 
while Paris, impatient of the weakness and misrule of the Regen- 
cy, rose in arms against the Crown. The rising had hardly been 
crushed, when Edward again poured ravaging over the wasted 
land. Famine, however, proved its best defense. "I could not 
believe," said Petrarch of this time, " that this was the same France 
w^hich I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing presented it- 
self to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land uncul- 
tivated, houses in ruins. Even the neighborhood of Paris showed 
every where marks of desolation and conflagration. The streets 
are deserted, the roads overgrown with weeds, the whole is a vast 
solitude." Both parties were at last worn out. Edward's army 
had fallen back, ruined, on the Loire, when proposals of peace 
reached him. By the Treaty of Bretigny, the English King waived 
his claims on the crown of France and on the Duchy of Normandy. 
On the other hand, his Duchy of Acquitaine, which included Gas- 
cony, Guienne, Poitou, and Saintonge, was left to him, no longer as 
a fief, but in full sovereignty, while his new conquest of Calais re- 
mained a part of the possessions of the English Crown. 



Section II.— Tlie Good Parliament. 1360— 13 T 7. 

[^Authorities. — As in the last period: adding the account of the Good Parliament 
given by an anonymous chronicler in the 22d vol. of the "Archgeologia."] 



If we turn from the stirring but barren annals of foreign war- 
fare to the more fruitful field of constitutional progress, we are at 
once struck with a marked, change which takes place during this 
period in the composition of Parliament. The division, with which 
we are so familiar, into a House of Lords and a House of Commons 
formed no part of the original plan of Edward the First ; in the 
earlier parliaments, in fact, each of the four orders of clergy, bar- 
ons, knights, and burgesses met, deliberated, and made their grants 
apart from each other. This isolation, however, of the estates 
soon showed signs of breaking down. While the clergy, as we 
liave seen, held steadily aloof from any real union with its fellow- 
orders, the knights of the shire were drawn by the similarity of 
their social position into a close connection with the lords. They 
seem, in fact, to have been soon admitted by the baronage to an 
almost equal position with themselves, whether as legislators or 
councilors of the Crown. The burgesses, on the other hand, took 



248 



HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



little part in Parliamentary pi'oceedings, save in those which re- 
lated to the taxation of their class. But their ])Osition was raised 
by the strifes of the reign which followed, when their aid was 
needed by the baronage in its struggle with the Crown ; and their 
right to share fully in all legislative action was asserted in the 
famous statute of Edward the Second. Gradually too, through 
causes with which we are imperfectly acquainted, the knights of 
the shire drifted from their older connection with the baronage 
into so close and intimate a union with the representatives of the 
towns that at the opening of the reign of Edward the Third the 
two orders are found grouped formally together, under the name 
of " The Commons." It is difficult to overestimate the impor- 
tance of this change. Had Parliament remained broken up into 
its four orders of clergy, barons, knights, and citizens, its power 
would have been neutralized at every great crisis by the jeal- 
ousies and difficulty of co-operation among its component parts. 
Tlie permanent union of the knighthood and the baronage, on the 
other hand, would have converted Parliament into the mere rep- 
resentative of an aristocratic caste, and would have robbed it of 
the strength which it has drawn from its connection with the 
great bod}^ of the commercial classes. The new attitude of the 
knighthood, their social connection as landed gentry with the bar- 
onage, their political union with the burgesses, really welded the 
three orders into one, and gave that unity of feeling and action to 
our Parliament on which its power has ever since mainly depend- 
ed. From the moment of this change, indeed, we see a marked 
increase of Parliamentary activity. A crowd of enactments for 
the regulation of trade, whether wise or unwise, and for the pro- 
tection of the subject against oppression or injustice, as well as 
the great ecclesiastical provisions of this reign, show the rapid 
widening of the sphere of Parliamentary action. A jet larger de- 
velopment of their powers was offered to the Commons by Edward 
himself In his anxiety to shift from his shoulders the responsi- 
bility of the war with France, he referred to them for counsel on 
the subject of one of the numerous propositions of peace. As yet, 
however, the Commons shrank from the task of advising the Crown 
on so difficult a subject as that of state policy. " Most dreaded 
lord," they replied, " as to your war and the equipment necessary 
for it, we are so ignorant and simple that we know not how, nor 
have the power, to devise : wherefore we pray your Grace to ex- 
cuse us in this matter, and that it please you, with advice of the 
great and wise persons of your Council, to ordain what seems best 
to you for the honor and profit of yourself and of your kingdom ; 
and whatsoever shall be thus ordained by assent and agreement 
for you and your lords we readily assent to, and will hold it firm- 
ly established." But while shrinking from so wide an extension 
of their responsibility, the Commons wrested from the Crown a 
practical reform of the highest value. As yet their petitions, 
if granted, had been embodied by the Royal Council in " ordi- 
nances" at the close of the session, when it was impossible to de- 
cide whether the ordinance was in actual accordance with the pe- 



v.] 



TRE RUNDBED YEARS' WAR. 



249 



lition on which it was based. It was now agreed that, on the 
assent of the Crown to their petitions, they shouhi at once be con- 
verted into "statutes," and derive force of law from their entry 
on the. rolls of Parliament. 

The political responsibility which the Commons evaded was at 
last forced on them by the misfortunes of the war. In spite of 
quarrels in Brittany and elsewhere, peace had been fairly pre- 
served in the nine years which followed the Treaty of Bretigny ; 
but the shrewd eye of Charles V., the successor of John, was 
watching keenly for the moment of renewing the struggle. He 
had cleared his kingdom of the freebooters by dispatching them 
into Spain, and the Black Prince had plunged into the revolutions 
of that country only to return from his fruitless victory of IsTava- 
rete in broken health, and impoverished by the expenses of the 
campaign. The anger caused by the taxation which this necessi- 
tated was fanned by Charles into revolt. He listened, in spite of 
the treaty, to an appeal from the lords of Gascony, and summoned 
the Black Prince to his court. "I will come," replied the Prince, 
" but helmet on head, and with sixty thousand men at ray back." 
War, however, had hardly been declared, before the ability with 
Avhich Charles had laid his plans was seen in the seizure of Pon- 
thieu, and the insurrection of the whole country south of the Ga- 
ronne. The Black Prince, borne on a litter to the walls of Li- 
moges, recovered the town, which had been surrendered to the 
French, and by a merciless massacre sullied the fame of his earlier 
exploits ; but sickness recalled him home, and the Avar, protracted 
by the caution of Charles, who had forbidden his armies to en- 
gage, did little but exhaust the energy and treasures of England. 
At last, however, the fatal error of the Prince's policy Avas seen in 
the appearance of a Spanish fleet in the Channel, and in a deci- 
sive victory which it won over an English convoy off Pochelle. 
The blow Avas in fact fatal to the English cause, Avresting as it did 
from them the mastery of the seas ; and Charles Avas roused to 
new exertions. Poitou, Saintonge, and the Angoumois yielded to 
his general. Da Guesclin, Avhile a great army under John of Gaunt 
penetrated fruitlessly into the heart of France. Charles had for- 
bidden any fighting. "If a storm rages over the land," said the 
King, coolly, "it disperses of itself ; and so will it be Avith the En- 
glish." Winter, in fact, overtook the Duke of Lancaster in the 
mountains of Auvergne, and a mere fi-agment of his great host 
reached Bordeaux. The failure Avas the signal for a general de- 
fection, and ere a year had passed the tAVO toAvns of Bordeaux and 
])ayonne Avere all that remained of the English possessions in Ac- 
quitaine. 

It Avas a time of shame and suffering such as England had never 
knoAvn. Her conquests Avere lost, her shores insulted, her fleets 
annihilated, her commerce swept from the sea; Avhile within she 
was exhausted by the long and costly Avar, as Avell as by the rav- 
ages of pestilence. In the hour of distress the eyes of the feudal 
baronage turned greedily on the riches of the Church. Never had 
her spiritual or moral hold on the nation been less ; never had her 



250 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



wealth been greater. Out of a population of little more than two 
millions, the ecclesiastics numbered between twenty and thirty- 
thousand, owning in landed property alone more than a third of 
the soil ; their " spiritualities" in dues and ofiei-ings amounting to 
twice the royal revenue. The position of the bishops as statesmen 
was still more galling to the feudal baronage, flushed as it was 
with a new pride by the victories of Cressy and Poitiers. On the 
renewal of the war the Bishop of Winchester, William of Wyke- 
ham, was at once removed, with other prelates, from the ministry, 
and their places filled by creatures of the baronage, with John of 
Gaunt, the King's son, at their head. Heavy taxes were imposed 
on Church lands, and projects of confiscation were openly advo- 
cated. But the ntter failure of the new administration and the 
calamities of the war left it powerless before the Parliament of 
1376. The action of this Parliament marks a new stage in the 
character of the national opposition to the illegal government of 
the Crown. Till now the task of resistance had devolved on the 
baronage, and had been carried out through risings of its feudal 
tenantry ; but the misgovernraent was now that of the baronage 
itself. The progress of peace and order had rendered a recourse 
to warfare odious to the people at large, while the power of the 
Commons afforded an adequate means of peaceful redress. The 
old reluctance to meddle with matters of state was roughly swept 
away by the pressure of the time. The knights of the shire united 
with the burgesses in a joint attack on the Royal Council. "Trust- 
ing in God, and standing with his followers before the nobles, 
whereof the chief was John Duke of Lancaster, whose doings wei*e 
ever contrary," their speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare, denounced the 
mismanagement of the war, the oppressive taxation, and demanded 
an account of the expenditure. " What do these base and ignoble 
knights attempt ?" cried John of Gaunt. "Do they think they be 
kings or princes of the land ?" But it was soon discovered that, 
sick as he was to death, the Black Prince gave his hearty support 
to the cause of the Commons. Lancaster was forced to withdraw 
from the Council, and the Parliament proceeded fearlessly in its 
task of investigation. A terrible list of abuses was revealed, 
which centred in the infamy of the King himself, who had sunk into 
a premature dotage, and was wholly under the influence of a mis- 
tress named Alice Perren, She was forced to swear never to return 
to the King's presence ; and the Parliament proceeded to the im- 
peachment and condemnation of two ministers, Lord Latimer and 
William Lyons, and to the solemn presentation of one hundred and 
sixty petitions which embodied the grievances of the realm. They 
demanded the annual assembly of Parliament, and freedom of elec- 
tion for the knights of the shire, whose choice was now often tam- 
pered with by the Crown ; they protested against arbitrary taxa- 
tion and Papal inroads on the "liberties of the Church ; petitioned 
for the protection of trade, and demanded a vigorous prosecution 
of the war. The death of the Prince suddenly interrupted the 
work of reform ; Lancaster resumed his power, and by an unscrupu- 
lous interference with elections procured the return of a new Par- 



V-] 



TEE HUNDRED TEARS' JVAIi. 



251 



liament, which reversed the acts of its predecessor. The greed of 
the triumphant baronage broke out in a fresh strife with the great 
churchmen who had, whether for their own purposes or not, sup- 
ported the popular party. William of Wykeham Avas again dis- 
missed from office, and summoned to Parliament. Fresh projects 
of spoliation were openly canvassed, and it is his support of these 
plans of confiscation which first brings us historically across the 
path of John Wyclif. 

Section III.— John Wyclif. 

{^Authorities. — In addition to tbe lives of Wyclif by Lewis and Vanghan, we now 
possess Dr. Shirley's invaluable account of the Reformer in his preface to the " Fas- 
ciculi Zizaniorum" (published by the Master of the Eolls), the documents appended 
to which are of primary authority for his history and that of his followers. Wyclif 's 
English books have been collected by Mr. Thomas Arnold for the University of Ox- 
ford ; his Bible has been republished with a valuable preface by Eev. J. Forshall and 
Sir F. Madden. Milman (" Latin Christianity," vol. vi.) has given a brilliant sum- 
mary of the Lollard movement.] 



Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between the ob- 
scurity of Wyclif's earlier life and the fullness and vividness of 
our knowledge of him during the twenty years which preceded its 
close. Born in the earlier part of the fourteenth century, he had 
already passed middle age when he was appointed to the master- 
ship of Balliol College in the University of Oxford, and recognized 
as first among the school-men of his day. Of all the scholastic 
doctors those of England had been throughout the keenest and 
the most daring in philosophical speculation ; a reckless audacity 
and love of novelty were the common note of Bacon, Duns Scotus, 
and Ockham, as against the sober and more disciplined learning 
of the Parisian school-men, Albert and Aquinas. But the decay of 
the University of Paris during the English wars had transferred 
her intellectual supremacy to Oxford, and in Oxford Wyclif stood 
without a rival. To his predecessor, Bradwardine, whose work as 
a scholastic teacher he carried on in the speculative treatises he 
published during this period, he owed the tendency to a predes- 
tinarian Augustinianism which formed the groundwork of his 
later theological revolt. His debt to Ockham revealed' itself in 
his earliest eiforts at Church reform. Undismayed by the thun- 
der and excommunications of the Church, Ockham had not shrunk 
in his enthusiasm for the empire from attacking the foundations 
of the Papal supremacy or from asserting the rights of the civil 
power. The spare, emaciated frame of Wyclif, weakened by study 
and by asceticism, hardly promised a reformer who would carry 
on the stormy work of Ockham ; but within this frail form lay a 
temper quick and restless, an immense energy, an immovable con- 
viction, an unconquerable pride. The personal charm which ever 
accompanies real greatness had only deepened the influence he 
derived from the spotless purity of his life. As yet indeed even 
Wyclif himself can hardly have suspected the immense range of his 
intellectual power. It was only the struggle that lay before him 



252 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



which revealed in the dry and subtle school-man the founder of 
our later English prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, of 
persuasion, a dexterous politician, an audacious partisan, the or- 
ganizer of a religious order, the unsparing assailant of abuses, the 
boldest and most indefatigable of controversialists, the first Re- 
former who dared, when deserted and alone, to question and deny 
the creed of the Christendom around him, to break through the 
tradition of the past, and with his last breath to assert the free- 
dom of religious thought against the dogmas of the Papacy. 

The attack of Wyclif began precisely at the moment when the 
Church of the Middle Ages had sunk to its lowest point of spirit- 
ual decay. The transfer of the Papacy to Avignon robbed it of 
much of the awe in which it had been held, for not only had the 
popes sunk into creatures of the French King, but their greed and 
extortion produced almost universal revolt. The claim of first 
fruits and annates from all ecclesiastical preferments, the assump- 
tion of a right to dispose of all benefices in ecclesiastical patronage, 
the imposition of direct taxes on the clergy, the intrusion of for- 
eign priests into English livings and English sees, produced a 
fierce hatred and contempt of Rome which never slept till the 
Reformation. The people scorned a "French Pope," and threat- 
ened his legates with stoning when they landed. The Avit of 
Chaucer flouted the wallet of " pardons hot from Rome." Parlia- 
ment vindicated the riglit of the state to prohibit the admission 
or execution of Papal bulls or briefs within the realm by the 
Statute of Praemunire, and denied the Papal claim to dispose of 
benefices by that of Provisors. But the failure of the effort show- 
ed the amazing power which Rome had acquired from the unques- 
tioning submission of so many ages. The Pope waived indeed his 
right to appoint foreigners ; but by a compromise, in which Pope 
and King combined for the enslaving of the Church, archbishop- 
rics, bishoprics, abbacies, and the wealthier livings still continued 
to receive Papal nominees. The protest of the Good Parliament 
is a record of the ill-success of its predecessor's attempt. It assert- 
ed that the taxes levied by the Pope amounted to five times the 
amount of those levied by the King, that by reservation during the 
life of actual holders he disposed of the same bishopric four or five 
times- over, receiving each time the first fruits. " The brokers of the 
sinful City of Rome promote for money unlearned and unworthy 
caitiffs to benefices of the value of a thousand marks, while the 
poor and learned hardly obtain one of twenty. So decays sound 
learning. They present aliens who neither see nor care to see 
their parishioners, despise God's services, convey away the treas- 
ure of the realm, and are worse than Jews or Saracens. The 
Pope's revenue from England alone is larger than that of any 
prince in Christendom. God gave his sheep to be pastured, not 
to be shaven and shorn." The grievances were no trifling ones. 
At this very time the deaneries of Lichfield, Salisbury, and York, 
the archdeaconry of Canterbury, which was reputed the wealth- 
iest English benefice, together with a host of jarebends and prefer- 
ments, were held by Italian cardinals and priests, while the Pope's 



v.] 



THE HUNDBED YEARS' WAR. 



2o{ 



collector from his office in London sent twenty thousand marks a 
year to the Papal treasury. 

If extortion and tyranny sucli as these severed the English clergy 
from the Papacy, their own selfishness severed them from the na- 
tion at large. Immense as was their wealth, they bore as little as 
they could of the common burdens of the realm. The old quarrel 
over the civil jurisdiction still lingered on, and the mild punish- 
ments of the ecclesiastical courts carried little dismay into tlie 
mass of disorderly clerks. Privileged as they were against all in- 
terference from the world without, the clergy penetrated by their 
control over wills, contracts, divorce, by the dues they exacted, 
as well as by directly religious offices, into the very heart of the 
social life around them. Thousands of summoners enforced their 
social jurisdiction, and there were few persons of substance who 
escaped the vexations of their courts. On the other hand, their 
moral authority was rapidly passing away ; the wealthiest church- 
men, with curled hair and lianging sleeves, aped the costume of 
the knightly society to which they really belonged. We have al- 
ready seen the general impression of their worldliness in Chaucer's 
picture of the hunting monk and the courtly prioress, with her 
love-motto on her brooch. Over the vice of the higher classes they 
exerted no influence whatever; the King paraded his mistress as 
a queen of beauty through London, the nobles blazoned their in- 
famy in court and tournament. " In those days," says a canon of 
the time, " arose a great rumor and clamor among the people, 
that wherever there was a tournament there camo a great con- 
course of ladies of the most costly and beautiful, but not of the 
best, in the kingdom, sometimes forty or fifty in number, as if 
they were a part of the tournament, in diverse and Avonderful 
male apparel, in party-colored tunics, with short caps and bands 
wound cord-wise round their head, and girdles bound with gold 
and silver, and daggers in pouches across their body, and then 
they proceeded on chosen coursers to the place of tourney, and so 
expended and wasted tlieir goods and vexed their bodies Avith 
scurrilous M^antonness that the rumor of the people sounded ev- 
ery where ; and thus they neither feared God nor bluslied at the 
chaste voice of the people." They were not called on to blush at 
the chaste voice of the Church. The clergy were in fact rent by 
their own dissensions. The higher prelates Avere busy with the 
cares of political office, and severed from the lower priesthood by 
the scandalous inequality between the revenues of the wealthier 
ecclesiastics and the " poor parson" of the country. The older re- 
ligious orders had sunk into mere land-owners, while the enthusi- 
asm of the friars had utterly died away and left a crowd of impu- 
dent mendicants behind it. In Oxford itself a fierce schism had 
for some time divided the secular clergy, who now came to the 
front of the scholastic movement, from the regulars with whom it 
had begun. Fitz-Ralf, the Archbishop of Armagh, who had been 
its chancellor, attributed to the friars the decline in the num- 
ber of academical students; and the university checked by statute 
their admission of mere children into their orders. Wyclif, at a 



254 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Seo. III. 



JOHS 

WyotlF. 



later time, denounced them as sturdy beggars, and declared form- 
ally that "the man who goes alone to a begging friar is ipso facto 
excommunicate." 

Without the warning ranks of the clergy stood a world of ear- 
nest men who, like Piers the Ploughman, denounced their worldli- 
ness and vice, skeptics, like Chaucer, laughing at the jingling bells 
of their hunting abbots, and the brutal and greedy baronage un- 
der John of Gaunt, eager to drive the prelates from office and to 
seize on their wealth. Worthless as the last party seems to us, it 
was with John of Gaunt that Wyclif had allied himself in the first 
effort he made for the reform of the Church. As yet his quarrel 
was not with its doctrine, but with its jDractice : it was on the 
principles of Ockham that he defended the Parliament's indignant 
refusal of the "tribute" which was claimed by the Papacy, the ex- 
pulsion of the bishops from office by the Duke of Lancaster, and 
the taxation of Church lands. But his treatise on "The Kingdom 
of God" (De Dominio Divino) shows how different his aims really 
were from the selfish aims of the men with whom he acted. In 
this, the most famous of his works, Wyclif bases his action on a 
distinct ideal of society. All authority, to use his own expression, 
is "founded in grace." Dominion in the highest sense is in God 
alone; it is God who, as the suzerain of the universe, deals out His 
rule in fief to rulers in their various stations on tenure of their 
obedience to himself It Avas easy to object that in such a 6ase 
" dominion" could never exist, since mortal sin is a breach of such 
a tenure, and all men sin. But, as Wyclif urged it, the theory is 
a purely ideal one. In actual practice he distinguishes between 
dominion and power, power which the wicked may have by God's 
permission, and to which the Christian must submit from motives 
of obedience to God. In his own scholastic phrase, so strangely 
perverted afterward, here on earth " God must obey the devil," 
But whether in the ideal or practical view of the matter, all pow- 
er or dominion was of God. It was granted by Him not to one 
person. His Vicar on earth, as the Papacy alleged, but to all. The 
King was as truly God's Vicar as the Pope. The royal power 
was as sacred as the ecclesiastical, and as complete over temporal 
things, even the temporalities of the Church, as that of the Church 
over spiritual things. On the question of Church and State there- 
fore the distinction between the ideal and the practical view was 
of little account. His application of the theory of " dominion" to 
the individual conscience was of far higher and wider importance. 
Obedient as each Christian might be to king or priest, he him- 
self, as a possessor of " dominion," held immediately of God. The 
throne of God Himself was the tribunal of personal appeal. What 
the Reformers of the sixteenth century attempted to do by their 
theory of justification by faith, Wyclif had attempted to do by his 
theory of "dominion." It was a theory which in establishing a 
direct relation between man and God swept away the whole basis 
of a mediating priesthood on which the mediaeval Church was 
built ; but for a time its real drift was hardly perceived. To 
Wyclif 's theory of Church and State, his subjection of their tern- 



v.] 



THE HUNDEED YEARS' WAR. 



255 



poralities to the Crown, his contention that like other property 
they might be seized and employed for national purposes, his Avisli 
for their voluntary abandonment and the return of the Church to 
its original poverty, the clergy were more sensitive. They were 
just writhing under the attack on Wykeham by the nobles Avhen 
the treatise appeared, and in the prosecution of Wyclif, who was 
reo'arded as the theological bulwark of the Lancastrian party, 
they resolved to return blow for blow. He was summoned before 
Bishop Courtenay of London to answer for his heretical projDOsi- 
tions concerning the wealth of the Church. The Duke of Lancas- 
ter accepted the challenge as really given to himself, and stood by 
Wyclif's side in the Consistory Court at St. Paul's. But no trial 
took place. Fierce words passed between the nobles and the 
prelate ; the Duke himself was said to have threatened to drag 
Courteuay out of the church by the hair of his liead, and at last 
the London populace, to whom John of Gaunt was hateful, burst 
in to their bishop's rescue. Wyclif's life was saved with difficulty 
by the aid of the soldiery, but his influence seems to have been 
unshaken. Papal bulls, which had been procured by the bishops, 
directing the university to condemn and arrest him, only extort- 
ed a bold defiance. In a defense circulated widely through the 
kingdom and laid before Parliament, Wyclif broadly asserted that 
no man could be excommunicated by the Pope " unless he were 
first excommunicated by himself." He denied the right of the 
Church to exact or defend temporal privileges by spiritual cen- 
sures, declared that a church might justly be deprived by the 
king or lay lords of its property for defect of dutj^ and defended 
the subjection of ecclesiastics to civil tribunals. Bold as the de- 
fiance was, it won him the support of the people and the Crown. 
When he appeared at the close of the year in Lambeth Chapel to 
answer the Archbishop's summons, a message from the Court for- 
bade the Bishop to proceed, and the Londoners broke in and dis- 
solved the session. 

Wyclif was still working hand in hand with John of Gaunt in 
advocating his plans of ecclesiastical reform, when the great in- 
surrection of the peasants, which we shall soon have to describe, 
broke out under Wat Tyler. In a few months the whole of his 
work was undone. Not only was the power of the Lancastrian 
party on which Wyclif had relied for the moment annihilated, but 
the quarrel between the Baronage and the Church, on which his 
action had hitherto been grounded, was hushed in the presence 
of a common danger. Much of the odium of the outbreak too 
fell on the Reformer : the friars charged him with being a " sower 
of strife, who by his serpent-like instigation has set the serf against 
his lord," and though Wyclif tossed back the charge with dis- 
dain, he had to bear a suspicion which was justified by the con- 
duct of some of his followers. John Ball, who had figured in the 
front rank of the revolt, was claimed as one of his adherents, and 
was alleged to have denounced in his last hour the conspiracy 
of the " Wyclifites." His most prominent scholar, Nicholas Her- 
ford, was said to have openly ap^jroved the brutal murder of Arch- 



256 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



bishop Sudbury. Whatever belief such charges might gain, it is 
certain that from this moment all plans for the reorganization of 
the Church were confounded in the general odium which attached 
to the projects of the socialist peasant leaders, and that any hope 
of ecclesiastical reform at the hands of the Baronage and the Par- 
liament was at an end. But even if the Peasant Revolt had not 
deprived Wyclif of the support of the aristocratic party with 
whom he had hitherto co-operated, their alliance must have been 
dissolved by the new position which he had already taken up. 
Some months before the outbreak of the insurrection, he had by 
one memorable step passed from the position of a reformer of the 
discipline and political relations of the Church to that of a pro- 
testant against its cardinal beliefs. If there was one doctrine 
upon which the supremacy of the medigeval Church rested, it was 
the doctrine of transubstantiation. It was by his exclusive right 
to the performance of the miracle which was wrought in the mass 
that the lowliest priest was raised high above princes. With the 
formal denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation which Wyclif 
issued in the spring of 1381 began that great movement of revolt 
which ended, more than a century after, in the establishment of 
religious freedom, by severing the mass of the Teutonic peoples 
from the general body of tlie Catholic Church. The act was the 
bolder that he stood utterly alone. The university, in which his 
influence had been hitherto all-powerful, at once condemned him. 
John of Gaunt enjoined him to be silent. Wyclif was presiding 
as doctor of divinity over some disputations in the schools of the 
Augustinian Canons when his academical condemnation was pub- 
licly read ; but though startled for the moment he at once chal- 
lenged chancellor or doctor to disprove the conclusions at which 
he had arrived. The prohibition of the Duke of Lancaster he met 
by an open avowal of his teaching, a confession which closes 
proudly with the quiet words, "I believe that in the end the truth 
will conquer." For the moment his courage dispelled the panic 
around him. The university responded to his appeal, and by dis- 
placing his opponents from office tacitly adopted his cause. But 
Wyclif no longer looked for support to the learned or wealthier 
classes on whom he had hitherto relied. He appealed, and the ap- 
peal is memorable as the first of such a kind in our historv, to En- 
gland at large. With an amazing industry he issued tract after 
tract in the tongue of the people itself The dry, syllogistic Latin, 
the abstruse and involved argument which the great doctor had 
addressed to his academic hearers, were suddenly flung aside, and 
by a transition which marks the wonderful genius of the man the 
school- man was transformed into the pamphleteer. If Chaucer 
is the father of our later English poetry, Wyclif is the father of 
our later English prose. The rough, clear, homely English of his 
tracts, the speech of the plowman and the trader of the day, though 
colored with the picturesque phraseology of the Bible, is in its lit- 
erary use as distinctly a creation of his own as the style in which 
he embodied it — the terse, vehement sentences,.the stinging sar- 
casms, the hard antitheses which roused the dullest mind like a 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED TEARS' WAR. 



25^ 



whip. Once fairly freed from the trammels of unquestioning be- 
lief, Wyclif's mind worked fast in its career of skeiDticism. Par- 
dons, indulgences, absolutions, pilgrimages to the shrines of the 
saints, worship of their images, worship of the saints themselves, 
Avere successively denied, A formal appeal to the Bible as the 
one ground of faith, coupled with an assertion of the right of ev- 
ery instructed man to examine the Bible for himself, threatened 
the very groundwork of the older dogmatism with ruin. Nor 
were these daring denials confined to the small circle of the schol- 
ars who still clung to him ; with the practical ability which is so 
marked a feature of his character, Wyclif had organized, some few 
years before, an order of poor preachers, "the Simple Priests," 
whose coarse sermons and long russet dress moved the laughter 
of the clergy, but who now formed a priceless organization for the 
diffusion of their master's doctrines. How rapid their progress 
must have been we may see from the panic-struck exaggerations 
of their opponents. A lew years later every second man you met, 
they complain, was a Lollard; the followers of Wyclif abounded 
every Avhere and in alt classes, among the baronage, in the cities, 
among the peasantry of the country-side, even io the monastic 
cell itself 

"Lollard," a word which probably means much the same as 
"idle babbler," was the nickname of scorn with which the ortho- 
dox churchmen chose to insult their assailants. But this rapid 
increase changed their scorn into vigorous action. Courtenay, 
now become archbishop, summoned a council at Blackfriars, and 
formally submitted twenty-four propositions drawn from Wyclif's 
works. An earthquake in the midst of the proceedings terrified 
every prelate but the resolute Primate ; the expulsion of ill-hu- 
mors from the earth, he said, was of good omen for the expulsion 
of ill-humors from the Church ; and the condemnation was pro- 
nounced. Then the Archbishop turned fiercely' upon Oxford as 
the fount and centre of the new heresies. Li an English sermon 
at St. Frideswide's, Nicholas Herford had asserted the truth of 
Wyclif's doctrines, and Courtenay ordered the chancellor to si- 
lence him and his adherents on pain of being himself treated as a 
heretic. The chancellor fell back on the liberties of the univer- 
sity, and appointed as preacher another Wyclifite, Repyngdon, 
who did not hesitate to style the Lollards " holy priests," and to 
affirm that they were protected by John of Gaunt. Party spirit 
meanwhile ran high among the students; the bulk of them sided 
with the Lollard leaders, and the Carmelite Peter Stokes, who had 
procured the Archbishop's letters, cowered panic-stricken in his 
chamber while the chancellor, protected by an escort of a hun- 
dred townsmen, listened approvingly to Repyngdon's defiance. 
"I dare go no further," wrote the poor friar to the Ai'chbishop, 
"for fear of death;" but he soon mustered courage to descend 
into the schools where Repyngdon was now maintaining that the 
clerical order was " better when it Avas but nine years old than 
now that it has grpwn to a thousand years and moi-e." The ap- 
pearance, however, of scholars in arms again drove Stokes to fly 

17 



:58 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



in despair to Lambeth, while a new heretic in open congregation 
maintained Wyclif's denial of transubstantiatiuu. "There is no 
idolatry," cried William James, " save in the sacrament of the 
altar." " You speak like a wise man," replied the chancellor, 
Robert Rygge. Courtenay, however, was not the man to bear de- 
fiance tamely, and his summons to Lambeth wrested a submission 
from Rygge which was only accepted on his pledge to suppress 
the Lollardism of the university. "I dare not publish them, on 
fear of death," exclaimed the chancellor when Chichele handed 
him his letters of condemnation. "Then is your university an 
open fautor of heretics," retorted the Primate, " if it suffers not 
the Catholic truth to be proclaimed within its bounds." The 
Royal Council supported the Archbishop's injunction, but the pub- 
lication of the decrees at once set Oxford on fire. The schol- 
ars threatened death to the friars, " crying that they wished to 
destroy the university." The masters suspended Henry Crump 
from teaching, as a troubler of the public peace, for calling the 
Lollards " heretics." The Crown, however, at last stepped rough- 
ly in to Courtenay's aid, and a royal Avrit ordered the instant 
banishment of all favorers of Wyclif, with the seizure and de- 
struction of all Lollard books, on pain of forfeiture of the univer- 
sity's privileges. The threat produced its effect. Herford and 
Repyngdon appealed in vain to John of Gaunt for protection ; the 
Duke himself denounced them as heretics against the sacrament 
of the altar, and after much evasion they were forced to make a 
formal submission. Within Oxford itself the suppression of Lol- 
lardism was complete ; but with the death of religious freedom all 
trace of intellectual life suddenly disappears. The century which 
followed the triumphs of Courtenay is the most barren in its an- 
nals, nor was the sleep of the university broken till the advent of 
the new learning restored to it some of the life and liberty which 
the Primate had so roughly trodden out. 

Nothing marks more strongly the grandeur of Wyclif's position 
as the last of the great school-men, than the reluctance of so bold 
a man as Courtenay even after his triumph over Oxford to take 
extreme measures against the head of Lollardry. Wyclif, though 
summoned, had made no appearance before the "Council of the 
Earthquake." "Pontius Pilate and Herod are made friends to- 
day," was his bitter comment on the new union which it proved 
to have sprung up between the prelates and the monastic orders 
who had so long been at variance with each other; "since they 
have made a heretic of Christ, it is an easy inference for them to 
count simple Christians heretics." He seems indeed to have been 
sick at the moment, but the announcement of the final sentence 
roused him to life again. "I shall not die," he is said to have 
cried at an earlier time when in grievous peril, " but live and de- 
clare the works of the friars." He petitioned the King and Par- 
liament that he might be allowed freely to prove the doctrines he 
had put forth, and turning with characteristic energy to the at- 
tack of his assailants, he asked that all religious vows might be 
suppressed, that tithes might be diverted to the maintenance of 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



259 



the poor, and the clergy maintained by the free alms of their flocks, 
that the Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire might be enforced 
against the Papacy, that churchmen might be declared incapable 
of secular offices, and imprisonment for excommunication cease. 
Finally, in the teeth of the Council's condemnation, he demanded 
that the doctrine of the eucharist which he advocated might be 
freely taught. If he appeared in the following year before the 
Convocation at Oxford, it was to perplex his opponents by a dis- 
play of scholastic logic which permitted him to retire without any 
retractation of his sacramental heresy. For the time his opponents 
seemed satisfied with his expulsion from the university, but in his 
retirement at Lutterworth he was forging during these troubled 
years the great weapon which, wielded by other hands than his 
own, was to produce so terrible an effect on the triumphant hie- 
rarchy. An earlier translation of the whole Bible, in part of which 
he was aided by his scholar Herford, was being revised and brought 
to the second form, which is better known as " Wyclif's Bible," 
when death drew near. The appeal of the prelates to Rome was 
answered at last by a brief ordering him to apjjear at the Papal 
Court. His failing strength exhausted itself in the cold sarcastic 
reply which explained that his refusal to comply with the sum- 
mons simply sprang from broken health. "I am always glad," 
ran the ironical answer, " to explain my faith to any one, and 
above all to the Bishop of Rome ; for I take it for granted that if 
it be orthodox he will confirm it, if it be erroneous he will correct 
it. I assume, too, that as chief Vicar of Christ upon earth the 
Bishop of Rome is of all mortal men most bound to the law of 
Christ's Gospel, for among the disciples of Christ a majority is not 
reckoned by simply counting heads in the fashion of this world, 
but according to the imitation of Christ on either side. Now 
Christ during His life upon earth was of all men the poorest, cast- 
ing from Him all worldly authority. I deduce from these prem- 
ises, as a simple counsel of my own, that the Pope should surrender 
all temporal authority to the civil power, and advise his clergy to 
do the same." The boldness of his words sprang perhaps from a 
knowledge that his end was near. The terrible strain on energies 
enfeebled by age and study had at last brought its inevitable re- 
sult, and a stroke of paralysis Avhile Wychf was hearing mass in 
his parish church of Lutterworth was followed on the next day by 
his quiet death. 

Section IV.— Tlie Peasant Revolt. 1377—1381. 

[Authorities. — For the condition of land and labor at this time, see the "Histoiy 
of Prices, "by Professor Thorold Rogers, the "Domesday-Book of St. Paul's" (Cam- 
den Society) with Archdeacon Hale's valuable introduction, and Mr. Seebohm's 
"Essays on the Black Death" (Fortnightly Review, 1865). Among the chroniclers, 
Knyghton and Walsingham are the fullest and most valuable. Tlje great Labor 
Statutes will be found in the Parliamentary Rolls.] 



The religious revolution which we have been describing gave 
fresh impulse to a revolution of even greater importance, W'hich 



260 



HISTOBY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



lia,d for a long time been changing the whole face of the country. 
The manorial system, on which the social organization of every 
rural part of England rested, had divided the land, for the pur- 
poses of cultivation and of internal order, into a number of large 
estates ; in each of which about a fourth of the soil was usually re- 
tained by the owner of the manor as his demesne or home-farm, 
while the remainder was distributed, at the period we have reach- 
ed, among tenants who were bound to render service to their lord. 
We know hardly any thing of the gradual process by which these 
tenants had arisen out of the slave class who tilled the lands of the 
first English settlers. The slave, indeed, still remained, though the 
number of pure "serfs" bore a small proportion to the other culti- 
vators of the soil. He was still, in the strictest sense, his lord's 
property ; he was bound to the soil, he paid head-money for license 
to remove from the estate in search of trade or hire, and a refusal 
to return on recall by his owner would have ended in his pursuit as 
a fugitive outlaw. But even this class had now acquired definite 
rights of its own ; and although we still find instances of the sale 
of serfs " with their litter," or family, apart from the land they 
tilled, yet, in the bulk of (lases, the amount of service due from the 
serf had become limited by custom, and, on its due rendering, his 
holding was practically as secure as that of the freest tenant on 
the estate. But at a time earlier than any record we possess the 
mass of the agricultural population had risen to a position of' far 
greater independence than this, and now formed a class of j^easant 
proprietors, inferior indeed to the older Teutonic freeman, but far 
removed from the oi'iginal serf Not only had their service and 
the time of rendering it become limited by custom, not only had 
the jDOSsession of each man's little hut with the plot around it, and 
the privilege of turning out a few cattle on tlie waste of tlie man- 
or, passed from mere indulgences granted and withdrawn at a 
lord's caprice into rights which could be pleaded at law, but the 
class as a whole were no longer "in the power of the lord." The 
claim of the proprietors over peasants of this kind ended with the 
due rendering of their service in the cultivation of his demesne, 
and this service might be rendered either personally or by deputy. 
It was the nature and extent of this labor-rent which determined 
the rank of the tenants among themselves. The villain, or free 
tenant, for instance, was only bound to gather in his lord's harvest 
and to aid in the plowing and sowing of autumn and Lent, while 
the cotter, the border, and the laborer were bound to aid in the 
work of the home-farm throughout the year. The cultivation, in- 
deed, of the home-farm, or, as it was then called, the demesne, rest- 
ed wholly with the tenants ; it was by them that the great grange 
of the lord was filled with sheaves, his sheep sheared, his grain malt- 
ed, the wood hewn for his hall fire. The extent of these services 
rested wholly on tradition, but the number of teams, the fines, the 
reliefs, the heriots which the lord could claim was, at this time, 
generally entered on the court-roll of the manor, a copy of which 
became the title-deed of the tenants, and gave them the name of 
copy-holders, by which they became known at a later period. Dis- 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEABS' WAR. 



261 



putes were easily settled by the steward of the manor on reference 
to this roll or on oral evidence of the custom at issue ; but a social 
arrangement, eminently characteristic of the English spirit of com- 
promise, generally secured a fair adjustment of the claims of em- 
ployer and employed. It was the duty of the lord's bailiff to ex- 
act their dues from the tenantry, but his coadjutor in this office, 
the reeve or foreman of the manor, was chosen by the tenants 
themselves, and acted as the reisresentative of their interests and 
their rights. 

The first disturbance of the system of tenure which we have 
described sprang from the introduction of leases. The lord of the 
manor, instead of cultivating the demesne through his own bailiff, 
often found it more convenient and profitable to let the manor to 
a tenant at a given rent, payable either in money or in kind. 
Thus we find the manor of Sandon leased by the Chapter of St. 
Paul's at a very early period on a rent which comprised the pay- 
ment of grain both for bread and ale, of alms to be distributed at 
the cathedral door, of wood to be used in its bakehouse and brew- 
ery, and of money to be spent in wages. It is to this system of 
leasing, or rather to the xisual terra for the rent it entailed (feorm, 
from the Latin firma), that we owe the words "farm" and "farm- 
er," the growing use of which from the twelfth century marks the 
first step in the rural revolution which we are examining. It was 
a revolution which made little direct change in the manorial sys- 
tem, but its indirect effect in breaking the tie on which the feudal 
organization of the manor rested, that of the tenant's personal de- 
pendence on his lord, and in affording an opportunity by which 
the wealthier among the tenantry could rise to a position of ap- 
parent equality with their older masters, was of the highest im- 
portance. This earlier step, however, in the modification of the 
manorial system, by the rise of the farmer class, was soon followed 
by one of a far more serious character in the rise of the free labor- 
er. Labor, whatever right it might have attained in other ways, 
was as yet in the strictest sense bound to the soil. Neither villain 
nor serf had any choice, either of a master or of a sphere of toil. 
The tenant was born, in fact, to his holding and to his lord. But 
the advance of society and the natural increase of population had 
for a long time been silently freeing the laborer from this local 
bondage. The influence of the Church had been exerted in pro- 
moting emancipation, as a work of piety, on all estates but its 
own. The fugitive bondsmen found freedom in a flight to char- 
tered towns, where a residence during a year and a day con- 
ferred franchise. Tlie increase of population had a far more seri- 
ous effect. The numbers of the English people seem to have all 
but tripled since the Conquest, and as the law of gavel-kind, which 
was applicable to all landed estates not held by military tenure, 
divided the inheritance of the tenantry equally among their sons, 
the holding of each tenant and the services due from it became 
divided in a corresponding degree. The labor-rent thus became 
more difficult to enforce, at the very time when the increase of 
wealth among the tenantry and the rise of a new spirit of inde- 



262 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[ClIAP. 



pendence made it more burdensome to those who rendered it. It 
was probably from this cause that the commutation of the arrears 
of labor for a money payment, which had long prevailed on every 
estate, gradually developed into a general commutation of services. 
We have already witnessed the silent progress of this remarkable 
change in the case of St. Edmundsbury, but the practice soon be- 
came universal, and "malt-silver," " wood-silver," and "larder sil- 
vei'" were gradually taking the place of the older personal serv- 
ices on the court-rolls, at the opening of the fourteenth century. 
Under the Edwards the process of commutation was hastened by 
the necessities of the lords themselves. The luxury of the time, 
the sjalendor and pomp of chivalry, the cost of incessant cam- 
paigns, drained the purses of knight and baron, and the sale of 
freedom to the serf or exemption from services to the villain af- 
forded an easy and tempting mode of refilling them. In this proc- 
ess Edward the Third himself led the way : commissioners were 
sent to royal estates for the especial purpose of selling manumis- 
sions to the King's serfs ; and we still possess the names of those 
who were enfranchised with their families by a payment of hard 
cash in aid of the exhausted exchequer. 

By this entire detachment of the serf from actual dependence 
on the land, the manorial system was even more radically changed 
than by the rise of the serf into a copy-holder. The whole social 
condition of the country, in fact, was modified by the appearaiice 
of a new class. The rise of the free laborer had followed that of 
the farmer ; labor was no longer bound to one spot or one master : 
it was free to hire itself to what employer, and to choose what 
field of employment it would. At the close of Edward's reign, in 
fact, the lord of a manor had been reduced over a large part of 
England to the position of a modern landlord, receiving a rental 
in money from his tenants, and dependent for the cultivation of his 
own demesne on hired labor ; while the wealthier of the tenants 
themselves often took the demesne on lease as its farmers, and 
thus created a new class intermediate between the larger proprie- 
tors and the customary tenants. The impulse toward a wider 
liberty given by the extension of this process of social change was 
soon seen on the appearance for the first time in our history of a 
spirit of social revolt. A Parliamentary statute of this period tells 
us that " villains and tenants of lands in villainage withdrew their 
customs and services from their lords, having attached themselves 
to other persons who maintained and abetted them; and who, un- 
der color of exemplifications from Domesday of the manors and 
villas where they dwelt, claimed to be quit of all manner of services, 
either of their body or of their lands, and would sufier no distress 
or other course of justice to be taken against them ; the villains 
aiding their maintainers by threatening the officers of their lords 
with peril to life and limb, as well by open assemblies as by con- 
federacies to support each other." The copy-holder was strug- 
gling to become a freeholder, and the farmer (perhaps) to be rec- 
ognized as proprietor of the demesne which he held on lease. It 
was while this struggle was growing in intensity that a yet more 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



26^ 



formidable difficulty met the lords who had been driven by the 
enfranchisement of their serfs to rely on hired labor. Every thing 
depended on the abundant supply of free laborers, and this abun- 
dance suddenly disappeared. The most terrible plague which the 
world had ever witnessed advanced at this juncture from the East, 
and after devastating Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean 
to the Baltic, swooped at the close of 1348 upon Britain. The tra- 
ditions of its destructiveness, and the panic-struck words of the 
statutes which followed it, have been more than justified by mod- 
ern research. Of the three or four millions who then formed the 
population of England, more than one half were swept away in 
its repeated visitations. Its ravages were fiercest in the great- 
er towns, where filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant 
haunt to leprosy and fever. In the burial-ground which the piety 
of Sir Walter Manny had purchased for the citizens of London, a 
spot whose site was afterward marked by the Charter House, more 
than fifty thousand corpses are said to have been interred. Near- 
ly sixty thousand people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the 
living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black Death 
fell on the village almost as fiercely as on the town. More than 
one-half of the priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; 
in the diocese of Norwich two-thirds of the parishes were left 
without incumbents. The whole organization of labor was thrown 
out of gear. The scarcity of hands made it difficult for the minor 
tenants to perform the services due for their lands, and only a tem- 
porary abandonment of half the rent by the land-owners induced 
the farmers to refrain from the abandonment of their farms. For 
the time cultivation became impossible. " The sheep and cattle 
straj^ed through the fields and corn," says a contemporary, "and 
there were none left who could drive them." Even when the first 
burst of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages consequent on 
the enormous diminution in the supply of free labor, though ac- 
companied by a corresponding rise in the price of food, rudely dis- 
turbed the course of industrial employments ; harvests rotted on 
the ground, and fields were left untilled, not merely from scarcity 
of hands, but from the strife which now for the first time revealed 
itself between capital and labor. 

While the land-owners of the country and the wealthier crafts- 
men of the town were threatened with ruin by what seemed to 
their age the extravagant demands of the new labor class, the 
country itself was torn with riot and disorder. The outbreak of 
lawless self-indulgence which followed every where in the wake of 
the plague told especially upon the " landless men," wandering in 
search of work, and for the first time masters of the labor mar- 
ket; and the wandering laborer or artisan turned easily into the 
"sturdy beggar," or the bandit of the woods. A summary re- 
dress for these evils was found by the Parliament and the Crown 
in a royal ordinance which was subsequently embodied in the 
Statute of Laborers. "Every man or woman," runs this famous 
act, I' of whatsoever condition, free or bond, able in body, and 
within the age of three-score years and not having of his own 



264 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of 
which he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be 
bound to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and 
shall take only the Avages which were accustomed to be taken iu 
the neighborhood where he is bound to serve" two years before 
the plague began. A refusal to obey was punished by imprison- 
ment. Sterner measures were soon found to be necessary, Not 
only was the price of labor fixed by the Parliament of 1350, but 
the labor class was once more tied to the soil. The laborer was 
forbidden to quit the parish where he lived in search of better- 
paid employment; if he disobeyed he became a "fugitive," and 
subject to imprisonment at the hands of the justices of the peace. 
To enforce such a law litei'ally must have been impossible, for corn 
had risen to so high a price that a day's labor at the old wages 
would not have purchased wheat enough for a man's support. 
But the land-owners did not flinch from the attempt. The re- 
peated re-enactment of the law shows the difficulty of applying 
it, and the stubbornness of the struggle which it brought about. 
The fines and forfeitures which were levied for infractions of its 
provisions formed a large source of royal revenue, but so ineffect- 
ual were the original penalties that the runaway laborer was at 
last ordered to be branded with a hot iron on the forehead, while 
the harboring of serfs in towns was rigorously put down, Nor 
was it merely the existing class of free laborers which was at- 
tacked by this reactionary movement. Not only was the pro'cess 
of emancipation suddenly checked, but the ingenuity of the law- 
yers, who were employed as stewards of each manor, was reckless- 
ly exercised in canceling on grounds of informality manumissions 
and exemptions which had passed without question, and in bring- 
ing back the villain and the serf into a bondage from which they 
held themselves fi'eed. The attempt was the more galling that the 
cause had to be pleaded in the manor court itself, and to be de- 
cided by the very officer whose interest it was to give judgment 
in favor of liis lord. We can see the growth of a tierce spirit of 
resistance through the statutes which strove in vain to repress it. 
In the towns, where the system of forced labor Avas applied with 
even more rigor than in the country, strikes and combinations be- 
came frequent among the lower craftsmen. In the country the 
free laborers found allies in the villains whose freedom from ma- 
norial service was questioned, and throughout Kent and the eastern 
counties the gatherings of " fugitive serfs" were supported by an 
organized resistance and by large contributions of money on the 
part of the wealthier tenantry. The cry of the poor found a ter- 
rible utterance in the words of " a mad priest of Kent," as the 
courtly Froissart calls him, who had for twenty years been preach- 
ing a Lollardry of coarser and more popular type than that of 
Wyclif, and who found audience for his sermons in defiance of in- 
terdict and imprisonment in the stout yeomen who had gathered in 
the Kentish church-yards. "Mad" as the land-owners called him, 
it was in the preaching of John Ball that England first listened to 
the knell of feudalism and the declaration of the rights of man. 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEJES' WAR. 



265 



" Good people," cried the preacher, " things will never go well in 
England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there 
be villains and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call 
lords greater folk than we ? On what grounds have they deserved 
it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the 
same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or 
prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us 
gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride ? They 
are clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and their ermines, 
while we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and 
fair bread ; and we oat-cake and straw, and water to drink. They 
have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labor, the rain 
and the wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil 
that these men hold their state." It was the tyranny of proper- 
ty that then as ever roused the" defiance of socialism. A spirit fa- 
tal to the whole system of the Middle Ages breathed in the pop- 
ular rhyme which condensed the leveling doctrine of John Ball : 
" When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentle- 
man ?" 

The rhyme was running from lip to lip when a fresh instance 
of public oppi'ession fanned the smouldering discontent into a 
flame. Edward the Third died in a dishonored old age, robbed on 
his death-bed even of his finger-rings by the vile mistress to whom 
he had clung, and the accession of the child of the Black Prince, 
Richard the Second, revived the hopes of what in a political sense 
we must still call the popular party in the Legislature. The Par- 
liament of 1377 resumed its work of reform, and boldly assumed 
the control of the expenditure by means of a standing committee 
of two burgesses of London: that of 1378 demanded and obtained 
an account of the mode in which its subsidies had been spent. 
But the real strength of these assemblies was directed, as we have 
seen, to the desperate struggle in which the proprietary classes, 
whom they exclusively represented, Avere striving to reduce the 
laborer into a fresh serfage. Meanwhile the shame of defeat 
abroad was added to the misery and discord at home. The 
French war ran its disastrous course : one English fleet was beat- 
en by the Spaniards, a second sunk by a storm ; and a campaign in 
the heart of France ended, like its predecessors, in disappointment 
and ruin. It was to defray the cost of these failures that the Par- 
liament granted a fresh subsidj^, to be raised by means of a poll- 
tax on every person in the realm. To such a tax the poorest man 
contributed as large a sum as the wealthiest, and the gross injus- 
tice of such an exaction set England on fire from sea to sea. In 
the eastern counties its levy gathered crowds of peasants togeth- 
er, armed with clubs, rusty swords, and bows ; the royal commis- 
sioners sent to repress the tumult were driven from the field, and 
a party of insurgents in Essex gave the signal for open revolt by 
crossing the Thames under Jack Straw and calling Kent to arms. 
Canterbury, where " the whole town was of their sort," threw 
open its gates, plundered the Archbishop's palace, and dragged 
John Ball from its prison, while a hundred thousand Kentishmen 



266 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



gathered round Wat Tyler, a soldier who had served in the 
French wars, and who Avas at once recognized as the head of the 
insurrection. Quaint rhymes passed through the country, and 
served as summons to the revolt, which soon extended from the 
eastern and midland counties over all England south of the 
Thames. " John Ball," ran one, " greeteth you all, and doth for 
to understand he hath rung your bell. Now right and might, 
will and skill, God speed every dele." "Plelp truth," ran another, 
" and truth shall help you ! Now reigneth pride in price, and 
covetise is counted wise, and lechery withouten shame, and glut- 
tony withouten blame. Envy reigneth wdth treason, and sloth is 
take in great season. God do bote, for now is tyme !" We rec- 
ognize Ball's hand in the yet more stirring missives of "Jack 
the Miller" and " Jack the Carter." " Jack Miller asketh help to 
turn his mill aright. He hath grounden small, small : the King's 
Son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look thy mill go aright with 
the four sailes, and the post stand with steadfastness. With right 
and with might, with skill and Avith will ; let might help right, 
and skill go before will, and right before might, so goeth our mill 
aright." "Jack Carter," ran the companion missive, " prays you 
all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do well, 
and aye better and better: for at the even men heareth the day." 
"Falseness and guile," sang Jack Trewman, "have reigned too 
long, and truth hath been set under a lock, and falseness and guile 
reigneth in every stock. No man may come truth to, but if he 
sing ' si dedero.' True-love is aAvay that was so good, and clerks 
for wealth work them woe. God do bote, for now is tyme." In 
the rude jingle of these lines began for England the literature of 
political controversy : they are the first predecessors of the pam- 
phlets of Milton and of Burke. Rough as they are, they express 
clearly enough the mingled passions which met in the revolt of 
the peasants : their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple 
justice; their scorn of the immorality of the nobles and the in- 
famy of the Court; their resentment at the perversion of the law 
to the cause of oppression. The revolt spread like wildfire over 
the country : Norfolk and Suffolk, Cambridge and Hertfordshire, 
rose in arms: from Sussex and Surrey the insurrection extended 
as far as Winchester and Somerset. But the strength of the ris- 
ing lay in the Kentishmen, who were marching on London. As 
they poured on to Blackheath, every lawyer who fell into tlieir 
hands was put to death ; " not till all these were killed would the 
land enjoy its old freedom again," the peasants shouted as they 
fired the houses of the stewards and flung the records of the man- 
or courts into the flames. The whole population joined them as 
they marched along, while the nobles were paralyzed with fear, 
and the Duke of Lancaster fled before the popular hatred over the 
border, and took refuge in Scotland. The young King — he was 
but a boy of sixteen — addressed them from a boat on the river; 
but the refusal of his Council under the guidance of Archbishop 
Sudbury to allow him to land kindled the peasants to fury, and 
with cries of " Treason" the great mass rushed on London. Its 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



2Q\ 



gates were flung open by the poorer artisans within the city, and 
the stately palace of Jolin of Gaunt at the Savoy, the new inn of 
the lawyers at the Temple, the houses of the foreign merchants, 
were soon in a blaze. But the insurgents, as they proudly boasted, 
were " seekers of truth and justice, not thieves or robbers," and a 
plunderer found carrying off a silver vessel from the sack of the 
tSavoy was flung with his spoil into the flames. The general ter- 
ror was shown ludicrously enough on the following day, when a 
daring band of peasants, under Tyler himself, forced their way 
into the Tower, and taking the panic-stricken knights of the gar- 
rison in rough horse-play by the beard, promised to be their equals 
and good comrades in the time to come. But the horse- play 
changed into dreadful earnest when Ai'chbishop Sudbury and some 
of the ministers who had hindered the King from a conference 
with the peasants were discovered in the chapel; the Primate was 
dragged from his sanctuary and beheaded on Tower Hill, and the 
same vengeance was wreaked on the treasurer and the chief com- 
missioner in the levy of the hated poll-tax. Meanwhile the King 
found the mass of the peasants waiting for a conference with him 
without the city at Mile-End. "I am your king and lord, good 
people," the boy began with a fearlessness which marked his whole 
bearing throughout the crisis; "what will ye?" "We will that 
you free us forever," shouted the peasants, " us and our lands ; 
and that we be never named nor held for serfs." "I grant it," re- 
plied Richard ; and he bade them go home, pledging himself at 
once to issue charters of freedom and amnesty. A shout of joy 
welcomed the promise. Throughout the day naore than thirty 
clerks were busied writing letters of pardon and emancipation, 
and with these the mass of the insurgents dispersed quietly to 
their homes. It was with such a charter that William Grinde- 
cobbe returned to St. Albans, and breaking at the head of the 
townsmen into the abbey }Dii"ecincts, summoned the abbot to de- 
liver u}) the chai'ters which bound the town in serfage to his house. 
But a more striking proof of its servitude remained in the mill- 
stones, which after a long suit at law had been surrendered to the 
abbey, and placed within its cloister as a triumphant witness that 
no burgess held the right of grinding corn within the bounds of its 
domain. The men of St. Albans now burst the cloister gates, and 
tearing the millstones from the floor, broke them into small pieces, 
" like blessed bread in church," so that each might have something 
to show of the day when their freedom was won again. 

Thirty thousand peasants, however, still remained with Wat 
Tyler to watch over the fulfillment of the royal pledge, and it was 
this body which Richard by a mere chance encountered the next 
morning at Smithfield. Hot words passed between his train and 
the peasant leader, who had advanced to a fresh conference with 
the King ; and a threat brought on a brief scufile, in which the 
Mayor of London, William Walworth, struck Tyler with his dag- 
ger to the ground. " Kill, kill," shouted the crowd, " they have 
killed our captain." " What need ye, my masters ?" cried the 
boy-King, as he rode boldly to the front. " I am your captain and 



268 



HISTORY OF TSE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



your king ! Follow me." The hopes of the peasants centred in 
the young sovereign : one object of their rising had been to free 
him from the evil counselors who, as they believed, abused his 
youth, and they now followed him with a touching loyalty and 
trust to the Tower. His mother welcomed him with tears of joy. 
"Rejoice and praise God," the boy answered, "for I have recov- 
ered to-day my heritage which was lost, and the realm of En- 
gland." The panic of the nobles had in fact passed away, and six 
thousand knights gathered round the King, eager for blood ; but 
Richard was as yet true to his word : he contented himself with 
issuing the promised letters of freedom and dismissing the peas- 
ants to their homes. The revolt, indeed, was far from being at 
an end. A strong body of peasants occupied St. Albans. In the 
eastern counties fifty thousand men forced the gates of St. Ed- 
mundsbury and wrested from the trembling monks a charter of 
enfranchisement for the town. Littester, a dyer of Norwich, 
headed a strong mass of peasants, under the title of the King of 
the Commons, and compelled the nobles he had captured to act as 
his meat-tasters and to serve him on their knees during his repast. 
But the death of Tyler gave courage to the nobles, while it seems 
to have robbed the action of the peasants of all concert and de- 
cision. The warlike Bishop of Norwich fell lance in hand on the 
rebel camp in his own diocese, and scattered them at the first 
shock ; while the King, with an army of 40,000 men, spread ter- 
ror by tlie ruthlessness of his executions as he marched in' tri- 
umph through Kent and Essex. But the stubbornness of the re- 
sistance which he met showed the temper of the people. The vil- 
lagers of Billericay demanded from the King the same liberties 
as their lords, and on his refusal threw themselves into the woods 
and fouglit two hard fights before they were reduced to submis- 
sion. It was only by threats of death that verdicts of guilty 
could be wrung from the Essex jurors when the leaders of the re- 
volt were brought before them. Grindecobbe was ofl:ered his life 
if he would jDersuade his followers at St. Albans to restore the 
charters they had wrung from the monks. He turned bravely to 
his fellow-townsmen and bade them take no thought for his trou- 
ble. "If I die," he said, "I shall die for the cause of the freedom 
we liave won, counting myself happy to end my life by such a 
martyrdom. Do, then, to-day as you would have done had I been , 
killed yesterday," But the stubborn will of the conquered was/ 
met by as stubborn a will in their conquerors. The Royal Council' 
indeed showed its sense of the danger of a mere policy of resist- 
ance by submitting the question of enfranchisement to the Parlia- 
ment which had assembled on the suppression of the revolt with 
words which suggested a compromise. " If you desire to enfran- 
chise and set at liberty the said serfs," ran the royal message, " by 
3^our common assent, as the King has been informed that some of 
you desire, he will consent to your prayer." But no thoughts of 
compromise influenced the land-owners in their reply. The King's 
grant and letters, the Parliament answered with perfect truth, 
were legally null and void : their serfs were their goods, and the 



v.] 



TEE HUNDRED YEABS' WAR. 



269 



King could not take their goods from them but by their own con- 
sent. "And this consent," they ended, " we have never given and 
never will give, were we all to die in one day." 



Section V.— Kicliard tlie Second. 1381—1399. 

[Authorities. — The "Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti," published by 
the Master of the Rolls (in ' ' Trokelovve et Anon. Chronica") form the basis for this 
period of the St. Albans compilation which passes under the name of Walsiugham, 
and from which the Life of Richard by the Monk of Evesham is for the most part 
derived. The same violent Lancastrian sympathy runs through Walsiugham and 
the fifth book of Knyghton's Chronicle, a work which we probably owe, not to 
Knyghton himself, but to a contemporary canon of Leicester. The French author- 
ities, on the other hand, are vehemently on Richard's side. Froissart, who ends at 
this time, is supplemented by the metrical history of Creton (in Archseologia, vol. xx.) 
and the " Chronique de laTraison et Mort de Richard" (English Historical Society), 
both the works of French authors, and published in France in the time of Henry the 
Fourth, probably with the aim of arousing French feeling against the policy of in- 
vasion which had been revived by the House of Lancaster. For the popular feeling 
in England we may consult Mr. Wright's "Political Songs from Edward III. to 
Richard III." (Master of Rolls' Series). The Foedera and Rolls of Parliament are 
indispensable for this period : its constitutional importance has been ably illustrated 
by Mr. Hallam ("Middle Ages"). The poem of William Longland, the "Com- 
plaint of Piers the Ploughman" (admirably edited by Mr. Skeat for the Early English 
Text Society), throws a flood of light on the social condition of England at the 
time; we owe to the same author a poem on "The Deposition of Richard IL," 
which has been published by the Camden Society. The best modern work on Rich- 
ard the Second is that of M. Wallon (" Richard II." Paris : 18G4)]. 



All the darker and sterner aspects of the age which we have 
been viewing, its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, 
the misery of the peasant, the pi'otest of the Lollard, are painted 
with a terrible fidelity in the poem of William Longland. Noth- 
ing brings more vividly home to us the social chasm which in the 
fourteenth century severed the rich from the poor than the con- 
trast between the " Complaint of Piers the Ploughman" and the 
" Canterbury Tales." The world of wealth and ease and laughter 
through which the courtly Chaucer moves with eyes downcast as 
in a pleasant dream is a far-off world of wrong and of ungodli- 
ness to the gaunt poet of the poor. Born probably in Shropshire, 
where he had been put to school and received minor orders as a 
clerk, "Long Will," as Longland was nicknamed for his tall stat- 
ure, found his way at an early age to London, and earned a mis- 
erable livelihood there by singing placebos and diriges in the state- 
ly funerals of his day. Men took the silent, moody clerk for a 
madman ; his bitter poverty quickened the defiant pride that 
made him loath — as he tells us — to bow to the gay lords and 
dames who rode decked in silver and minlvere along the Cheap, 
or to exchange a " God save you" with the law sergeants as he 
passed their new house in the Temple. His world is the world 
of the poor; he dwells on the poor man's life, on his hunger and 
toil, his rough revelry and his despair with the narrow intensity 
of a man who has no outlook beyond it. The narrowness, the 
misery, the monotony of the life he paints I'eflect themselves in his 



270 



HISTORY OF THE EXGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



Sec. V. 



RiClJAED 

TiiK Second. 



verse. It is only here and there that a love of nature or a grim 
earnestness of wrath quickens his rhyme into poetry ; there is not 
a gleam of the bright human sympathy of Chaucer, of his fresh 
delight in the gayety, the tenderness, the daring of the world 
about him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest contrasts, 
of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. The cumbrous allegory, 
the tedious platitudes, the rhymed texts from Scripture which 
form the staple of Longland's work, are only broken here and 
there by phrases of a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, 
by jDictures of a broad Hogarthian humor. What chains one to 
the poem is its deep under-tone of sadness : the world is out of 
joint, and the gaunt rliymer who stalks silently along the Strand 
has no faith in his power to put it right. His poem covers indeed 
an age of shame and suffering such as England had never known, 
for if its first brief sketch appeared two years after the Peace of 
Bretigny its completion may be dated at the close of the reign of 
Edward the Third, and its final issue preceded but by a single 
year the Peasant Revolt. Londoner as he is. Will's fancy flies 
far from the sin and suffering of the great city to a May morning 
in the Malvern Hills. " I was very forwandered and went me to 
rest under a broad bank by a burn side, and as I lay and leaned 
and looked in the water I slumbered in a sleeping, it sweyved 
(sounded) so merry." Just as Chaucer gathers the typical figures 
of the world he saw into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers 
into a wide field his army of traders and chaffei-ers, of hermits' and 
solitaries, of minstrels, "japers and jinglers," bidders and beggars, 
plowmen that " in setting and in sowing swonken (toil) full hard," 
pilgrims " with their wenches after," weavers and laborers, burgess 
and bondman, lawyer and scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, 
and jDardoners " parting the silver" with the parish priest. Their 
pilgrimage is not to Canterbury, but to Truth ; their guide to 
Truth neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the Ploughman, whom 
they find plowing in his field. He it is who bids the knight 
no more wrest gifts from his tenant nor misdo Avith the poor. 
"Tliough he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven that 

he be worthier set and with more bliss than thou For in char- 

nel at church churles be evil to know, or a knight from a knave 
there." The gospel of equality is backed by the gospel of labor. 
The aim of the Ploughman is to work, and to make the world work 
with him. He warns the laborer as he warns the knight. Hun- 
ger is God's instrument in bringing the idlest to toil, and Hunger 
waits to work her will on the idler and the Avnster. On the eve 
of the great struggle between wealth and labor, Longland stands 
alone in his fairness to both, in his shrewd political and religious 
common sense. In the face of the popular hatred toward John of 
Gaunt, he paints the Duke in a fiiraous apologue as the cat who, 
greedy as she might be, at any rate keeps the noble rats from ut- 
terly devouring the mice of the people. The poet is loyal to the 
Church, but his pilgrimage is not to Walsingham, but to Truth ; 
he proclaims a righteous life to be better than a host of indul- 
gences, and God sends His pardon to Piers when priests dispute 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



271 



it. But he sings as a man conscious of his loneliness and with- 
out hope. It is only in a dream that he sees Corruption, "Lady 
Meed," brought to trial, and the world repenting at the preaching 
of Reason. In the waking life Reason iinds no listeners. The 
poet himself is looked upon — he tells us bitterly — as a madman. 
There is a terrible despair in the close of his later poem, where 
the triumph of Christ is only followed by the reign of Antichrist ; 
where Contrition slumbers amid the revel of Death and Sin; and 
Conscience, hard beset by Pride and Sloth, rouses himself with a 
last eftbrt, and seizing his pilgrim staff wanders over the world to 
find Piers the Ploughman, 

The strife indeed which Longland would have averted raged only 
the more fiercely after the repression of the Peasant Revolt, The 
Statutes of Laborers, effective as they proved in sowing hatred 
between rich and poor, and in creating a mass of pauperism for 
later times to deal with, were powerless for their immediate ends, 
either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in restricting the 
mass of floating labor to definite areas of employment. During 
the century and a half after the Peasant Revolt villainage died 
out so rapidly that it became a rare and antiquated thing. A 
hundred years after the Black Death, we learn from a high author- 
ity that the wages of an English laborer " commanded twice the 
amount of the necessaries of life which could have been obtained 
for the wages paid under Edward the Third." The statement is 
corroborated by the incidental descriptions of the life of the work- 
ing classes which we find in "Piers the Ploughman." Laborers, 
Longland tells us, " that have no land to live on but their hands," 
disdained to live on penny ale or bacon, but demanded " fresh flesh 
or fish, fried or baken, and that hot or hotter for chilling of their 
maw." The market was still in fact in the laborer's hands, in 
spite of statutes ; " and but if he be highly hired else will he chide 
and wail the time that he was made a workman." The poet saw 
clearly that as population rose to its normal rate times such as 
these would pass away, " Whiles Hunger was their master here 
would none of them chide nor strive against his statute, so sternly 
he looked : and I warn you, workmen, win while ye may, for Hun- 
ger hitherward hasteth him fast." But even at the time when he 
Avrote there were seasons of the year during which employment 
for this floating mass of labor was hard to find. In the long in- 
terval between harvest-tide and harvest-tide, work and food were 
alike scarce in the mediaeval homestead. " I have no penny," says 
Piers the Ploughman in such a season, in lines which give us the 
picture of a farm of the day, "pullets for to buy, nor neither geese 
nor pigs, but two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an 
oaten cake, and two loaves of beans and bran baken for ray chil- 
dren. I have no salt bacon nor no cooked meat collops for to 
make, but I have parsley and leeks and many cabbage plants, and 
eke a cow and a calf, and a cart- mare to draw a-field my dung 
w-hile the drought lasteth, and by this livelihood we must all live 
till Lammas-tide (August), and by that I liope to have harvest in 
my croft." But it was not till Lammas-tide that high wages and 



2V2 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the new corn bade "Hunger go to sleep," and during the long 
spring and summer the free laborer, and the "waster that will 
not work but wander about, that will eat no bread but the finest 
wheat, nor drink but of the best and brownest ale," was a source 
of social and political danger, " He grieyeth him against God 
and grudgeth against Reason, and then curseth he the King and 
all his Council after such law to allow laborers to grieve." The 
terror of the land-owners expressed itself in legislation which was 
a fitting sequel of the Statutes of Laborers. They forbade the 
child of any tiller of the soil to be apprenticed in a town. They 
j)rayed Richard to ordain "that no bondman nor bondwoman 
shall place their children at school, as has been done, so as to ad- 
vance their children in the world by their going into the Church." 
The new colleges which were being founded at the two universi- 
ties at this moment closed their gates npon villains. It was the 
failure of such futile efforts to effect their aim which drove the 
energy of the great proprietors into a new direction, and in the 
end revolutionized the whole agricultural system of the country. 
Sheep-farming required fewer hands than tillage, and the scarcity 
and high price of labor tended to throw more and more land into 
sheep -farms. In the decrease of personal service, as villainage 
died away, it became the interest of the lord to diminish the num- 
ber of tenants on his estate as it had been before his interest to 
maintain it, and he did this by massing the small allotments to- 
gether into larger holdings. By this course of eviction the nnm- 
ber of the free-labor class was enormously increased while the 
area of employment Avas diminished ; and the social danger from 
vagabondage and the " sturdy beggar" grew every day greater 
till it brought about the despotism of the Tudors. 

This social danger mingled with the yet more formidable relig- 
ious peril which sprang from the party violence of the later Lol- 
lardry. The persecution of Courtenay had deprived the religious 
reform of its more learned adherents and of the support of the 
university, while Wyclif's death had robbed it of its head at a 
moment when little had been done save a work of destruction. 
From that moment Lollardism ceased to be in any sense an organ- 
ized movement, and crumbled into a general spirit of revolt. All 
the religious and social discontent of the times floated instinctive- 
ly to this new centre ; the socialist dreams of the peasantry, the 
new and keener spirit of personal morality, the hatred of the fri- 
ars, the jealousy of the great lords toward the prelacy, the fanati- 
cism of the Puritan zealot, were blended together in a common 
hostility to the Church and a common resolve to substitute per- 
sonal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical system. But it 
was this want of organization, this looseness and fluidity of the 
new movement, that made it penetrate through every class of so- 
ciety. Women as well as men became the preachers of the new 
sect. Its numbers increased till to the frenzied panic of the 
churchmen it seemed as if every third man in the streets were a 
Lollard. The movement had its own schools, its own books ; its 
pamphlets were passed every where from hand to hand; scurril- 



V-] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



2V3 



ous ballads, in which it revived old attacks of "Golias" in the 
Angevin times upon the wealth and luxury of the clergy, were 
sung at every corner. Nobles, like the Earl of Salisbury, and at 
a later time Sir John Oldcastle, placed themselves openly at the 
head of the cause, and threw open their gates as a refuge for its 
missionaries. London in its hatred of the clergy was fiercely Lol- 
lard, and defended a Lollard preacher who had ventured to advo- 
cate the new doctrines from the pulpit of St. Paul's. Its mayor, 
John of Northampton, showed the influence of the new moi'ality 
in the Pnritan spirit with which he dealt with the morals of the 
city. Compelled to act, as he said, by the remissness of the clergy, 
who connived for money at every kind of debauchery, he arrested 
the loose women, cut off their hair, and carted them through the 
streets as objects of public scorn. But the moral spirit of the 
new movement, though infinitely its grander side, was less dan- 
gerous to the Church than its open repudiation of the older doc- 
trines and systems of Christendom. Out of the floating mass of 
opinion which bore the name of Lollardry one great faith grad- 
ually evolved itself, a faith in the sole authority of the Bible as a 
source of religious truth. The translation of Wyclif did its work. 
Scripture, complains a canon of Leicester, "became a vulgar thing, 
and more open to lay folk and women that knew how to read 
than it is wont to be to clerks themselves." Consequences which 
Wyclif had perhaps shrunk from drawing were boldly drawn by 
his disciples. The Church was declared to have become apostate, 
its priesthood was denounced as no priesthood, its sacraments as 
idolatry. It was in vain that the clergy attempted to stifle the 
new movement by their old weapon of persecution. The jealousy 
entertained by the baronage and gentry of every pretension of 
the Church to secular power foiled its efforts to make persecution 
effective. At the moment of the Peasant Revolt, Courtenay pro- 
cured the enactment of a statute which commissioned the sheriffs 
to seize all persons convicted before the bishops of preaching her- 
esy. But the statute was repealed in the next session, and the 
Commons added to the bitterness of the blow by their protest 
that they considered it " in nowise their interest to be more un- 
der the jurisdiction of the prelates or more bound by them than 
their ancestors had been in times past." Heresy indeed was still 
a felony by the common law, and there were earlier instances in 
our history of the punishment of heretics by the fire. But the 
confining of each bishop's jurisdiction within the limits of liis 
own diocese made it almost impossible to arrest the wandering 
preachers of the new doctrine, and the civil punishment — even if 
it had been sanctioned by public opinion — seems to have long 
fallen into desuetude. Experience proved to the prelates that no 
sheriff would arrest on the mere warrant of an ecclesiastical offi- 
cer, and that no royal court would issue the old writ "for the 
burning of a heretic" on a bishop's requisition. But powerless as 
the efforts of the Church were for purposes of repression, they 
were effective in rousing the temper of the Lollards into a bitter 
and fanatical hatred of their persecutors. The Lollard teachers 

18 



274 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



directed their fiercest invectives against the wealth and secularity 
of the great churchmen. In a formal petition to Parliament they 
mingled denunciations of the riches of the clergy with an open 
profession of disbelief in transubstantiation, priesthood, pilgrim- 
ages, and image worship, and a demand, which illustrates the 
strange medley of opinions which jostled together in the new 
movement, that war might be declared unchristian, and that 
trades such as those of the goldsmith or the armorer, which were 
contrary to apostolical poverty, might be banished from the realm. 
They contended (and it is remarkable that a Parliament of the 
next reign adopted the statement) that from the superfluous rev- 
enues of the Church, if once they were applied to purposes of gen- 
eral utility, the King might maintain fifteen earls, fifteen hundred 
knights, and six thousand squires, besides endowing a hundred 
hospitals for the relief of the poor. 

The distress of the land-owners, the general disorganization of 
the country, in every part of which bauds of marauders were 
openly defying the law, the panic of the Church and of society at 
large as the jDrojects of the Lollards shaped themselves into more 
daring and revolutionary forms, added a fresh keenness to the na- 
tional discontent at the languid and inefiicient prosecution of the 
war. France was, in fact, mistress of the seas; Guienne lay at 
her mei'cy, and the northern frontier of England itself was flung 
open to her by the alliance of the Scots. The landing of a French 
force in the Forth roused the whole country to a des|)erate eflbrt, 
and a large and well-equipped army of Englishmen penetrated as 
far as Edinburgh in the vain hope of bringing their enemy to bat- 
tle. A more terrible blow followed in the submission of Ghent to 
the French forces, the reception of a French prince by Flanders 
as its count, and the loss of the one remaining market for English 
commerce ; while the forces which should have been employed in 
saving it, and in the protection of the English shores against the 
threat of invasion, were squandered by John of Gaunt on the 
Spanish frontier in pursuit of a visionary crown, which he claimed 
in his wife's right, the daughter of Pedro the Cruel. But even 
calamities such as these galled the national pride less than the 
peace tendency of the Court. Michael de la Pole, the Earl of 
Suflblk, had stood since the suppression of the revolt at the head 
of the royal councils, and the whole aim of his policy had been to 
bring about a reconciliation with France. Unsuccessful as they 
were in efliecting this object, his efibrts roused the resentment of 
the nobles, and at the instigation of the Duke of Gloucester, who, 
in the absence of his brother, John of Gaunt, had placed himself 
at its head, the Parliament demanded the dismissal of the minister, 
and the transfer of the royal power to a permanent council chosen 
by the lords. The resistance of the young King was crushed by 
the appearance of the baronage in arms, and a bill of impeach- 
ment hurried into exile and to death both the Earl and the judges 
of his party who had pronounced the rule of the Council to be in 
itself illegal. It may have been the violence of these measures 
which restored popular sympathy to the royal cause, for hardly a 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



215 



year had passed when Richard found himself strong ' enough to 
break down by a word the government against which he had 
struggled so vainly. In the great Easter Council he suddenly 
asked his uncle to tell him how old he was. " Your Highness," 
replied Gloucester, " is in your twenty-second year." " Then I am 
old enough to manage my own affairs," said Richard, coolly. "I 
have been longer under guardianship than any ward in my realm, 
I thank you for your past services, my lords, but I need them no 
longer." 

For nine years the young king wielded the power which thus 
passed quietly into his hands with singular wisdom and good for- 
tune. On the one hand he carried his peace policy into effect by 
a succession of negotiations which brought about the conclusion 
of a truce for four years, and this period of rest was lengthened 
to twenty-eight by a su.bsequent agreement on his marriage with 
Isabella, the daughter of Charles the Fifth of France. On the 
other he announced his resolve to rule by the advice of his Par- 
liament, submitted to its censure, and consulted it on all matters 
of importance. In a vigorous campaign he pacified Ireland while 
redressing the abuses of its government : and the Lollard troubles 
which had bi'oken out during his absence were at once repressed 
on his return. But the brilliant abilities which Richard shared 
with the rest of the Plantagenets were marred by a fitful incon- 
stancy and a mean spirit of revenge. His uncle, the Duke of 
Gloucester, remained at the head of the war-party ; his turbulent 
opposition to the peace policy of the King, and his resistance to 
the French marriage which embodied it, may have made a conflict 
inevitable; but the readiness with which Richard seized on the 
opportunity of provoking such a contest shows the bitterness 
with Avhich during the long years which had passed since the 
death of Suffolk he had brooded over his projects of vengeance. 
The Parliament which had been employed by Gloucester to hum- 
ble the Crown was now used to crush its opponents. The par- 
dons granted nine years before were recalled ; the commission of 
Regency declared to have been illegal, and it was ruled that the 
enactment of such a measure rendered its promoters guilty of 
treason. The blow was ruthlessly followed up. When the sum- 
mons to answer to his impeachment reached the Duke, he was 
found dead in his prison at Calais; while his chief supporter, 
Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was condemned to exile, 
and the nobles of his party to imprisonment. The measures in- 
troduced into the Parliament of the following year showed that 
from a mere project of revenge Richard's designs had widened 
into a definite plan of absolute government. He was freed from 
Parliamentary control by the grant to him of a tax upon wool for 
the term of his life. His next step got rid of Parliament itself 
A committee of twelve peers and six commoners was appointed 
in Parliament, with power to continue their sittings after its dis- 
solution, and to *' examine and determine all matters and subjects 
which had been moved in the presence of the King with all the 
dependencies thereof" The aim of Richard was to supersede by 



276 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



means of tliis permanent commission the body from which it had 
originated : he at once employed it to determine causes and enact 
laws, and forced from every tenant of the Crown an oath to rec- 
ognize the validity of its acts, and to oppose any attempts to alter 
or revoke them. With such an engine at his command the King 
was absolute, and with the appearance of absolutism the temper 
of his reign suddenly changed. A system of forced loans, the sale 
of charters of pardon to Gloucester's adherents, the outlawry of 
seventeen counties at once on the plea that they had supported 
his enemies, a reckless interference with the course of justice and 
the independence of the judges, roused into new life the social and 
political discontent which was threatening the very existence of 
the Crown. 

By his good government and by his evil government alike Rich- 
ard had succeeded in alienating every class of his subjects. He 
had estranged the nobles by his peace policy, the land-owners by 
his refusal to sanction the insane measures of repression they di- 
rected against the laborer, the merchant class by his illegal exac- 
tions, and the Church by his shelter of the Lollards. Not only 
had the persecution of the new^ sect been foiled by the inactivity 
of the royal officers and the repeal of the bills of heresy introduced 
by the Primate, but Lollardism found favor in the very precincts 
of the Court. It was through the patronage of Richard's first 
queen, Anne of Bohemia, that the tracts and Bible of the Reform- 
er had been introduced into her native land to give rise to' the 
remarkable movement which found its earliest leaders in John 
Huss and Jerome of Prague. The head of the sect, the Earl of 
Salisbury, was of all the English nobles the most favored by and 
the most faithful to the King. Richard stood almost alone in fact 
in his realm, but even this accumulated mass of hatred might have 
failed to crush him had not an act of jealousy and tyranny placed 
an able and unscrupulous leader at the head of the national dis- 
content. Henry, Earl of Derby and Duke of Hereford, the eldest 
son of John of Gaunt, though he had taken part against his royal 
cousin in the earlier troubles of his reign, had loyally supported 
him in his recent measures against Gloucester. ISTo sooner, how- 
ever, were these measures successful than Richard turned his new 
power against the more dangerous House of Lancaster, and avail- 
ing himself of a quarrel between the Dukes of Hereford and Nor- 
folk, in which each party bandied accusations of treason against 
the other, banished both from the realm. Banishment was soon 
followed by outlawry, and on his father's death Henry found him- 
self deprived both of the title and estates of his house. At the 
moment when he had thus driven his cousin to despair, Richard 
crossed into L'eland to complete the work of conquest and organ- 
ization which he had begun there ; and Archbishop Arundel, an 
exile like himself, urged the Earl to take advantage of the King's 
absence for the recovery of his rights. Eluding the vigilance of 
the French Court, at which he had taken shelter, Henry landed 
with a handful of men on the coast of Yorkshire, where he was at 
once joined by the Earls of ISTorthumberland and Westmoreland, 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



in'l 



the heads of the great houses of the Percies and the Nevilles; 
and, with an array which grew as he advanced, entered triumph- 
antly into Loudon. The Duke of York, whom the King had left 
regent, united, his forces to those of Henry, and when Richard 
landed at Milford Haven he found the kingdom lost. His own 
army dispersed as it landed, and the deserted King fled in dis- 
guise to North Wales to find a second force which the Earl of 
Salisbury had gathered for his support already disbanded. In- 
vited to a conference with the Duke of Lancaster at Flint, he saw 
himself surrounded, by the rebel forces. "I am betrayed," he cried, 
as the view of his enemies burst on him from the hill; " there are 
pennons and banners in the valley." But it was too late for re- 
treat. Richard was seized and brought before his cousin. "I am 
come before my time," said Lancaster, " but I will show you the 
reason. Your people, my lord, complain that for the space of 
twenty years you have ruled them harshly : however, if it please 
God, I will help you to rule them better." "Fair cousin," replied 
the King, " since it pleases you it pleases me well." But Henry's 
designs went far beyond a share in the government of the realm. 
The Parliament which assembled in Westminster Hall received 
with shouts of applause a formal paper in which Richard resigned 
the crown as one incapable of reigning and worthy for his great 
demerits to be deposed. The resignation was, in fact, confirmed 
by a solemn act of deposition. The coronation oath was read, 
and a long impeachment, which stated the breach of the promises 
made in it, was followed by a solemn vote of both Houses which 
removed Richard from the state and authority of king. Accord- 
ing to the strict rules of hereditary descent as construed by the 
feudal lawyers, by an assumed analogy with the descent of ordi- 
nary estates, the crown would now have passed to a house which 
had at an earlier period played a leading part in the revolu- 
tions of the Edwards. The great-grandson of the Mortimer who 
brought about the deposition of Edward the Second had married 
the daughter and heiress of Lionel of Clarence, the third son of 
Edward the Third. The childlessness of Richard and the death 
of Edward's second son without issue placed Edmund, his grand- 
son by this marriage, first among the claimants of the crown; but 
he was a child six years old, the strict rule of hereditary descent 
had never received any formal recognition in the case of the 
Crown, and precedent had established the right of Parliament to 
choose in such a case a successor among any other members of the 
royal house. With the characteristic subtlety of his temper, how- 
ever, Henry professed to disguise this choice of the nation by the 
assertion of a second right arising from a supposed conquest of 
the realm. He rose from his seat and solemnly challenged the 
crown, "as that I am descended by regal line of blood coming 
from the good lord King Henry the Third, and through that right 
that God of His Grace hath sent me with help of my kin and of 
my friends to recover it : the which realm was in point to be un- 
done for default of governance and undoing of good laws." What- 
ever defects such a claim might present were more than covered 



278 



HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



by the solemn recognition of Parliament. The two archbishops, 
taking the new sovereign by the hand, seated him upon the throne, 
and Henry in emphatic words ratified the compact between him- 
self and his people. " Sirs," he said to the prelates, lords, knights, 
and burgesses gathered round him, " I thank God and you, spirit- 
ual and temporal, and all estates of the land : and do you to wit 
it is not my will that any man think that by way of conquest I 
would disinherit any of his heritage, franchises, or other rights 
that he ought to have, nor put him out of the good that he has 
and has had by the good laws and customs of the realm, except 
those persons that have been against the good purpose and the 
common profit of the realm." 



Section VI.— Tlie House of Lancaster. 1399—1422. 

[Authorities. — For Henry the Fourth the "Annales Henrici Quarti" and Wal- 
singham, as before. For his successor, the " Gesta Henrici Quinti" by Titus Livius, 
a chaplain in the Eoyal army (published by the English Historical Society) ; the life 
by Elmham, Prior of Lenton, simpler in style but identical in arrangement and facts 
with the former work ; the biography by Eobert Redman, and the metrical Chroni- 
cle by Elmham, published by the Master of the Eolls under the title of "Memorials 
of Henry the Fifth;" with the meagre Chronicles of Hardyng and Otterbourne. 
Monstrelet is the most important French authority for this period; the Norman 
campaigns may be studied in M. Puiseux's "Sie'ge de Eouen,"Caen, 1867. Lord 
Brougham has given a vigorous and, in a constitutional point of view, valuable sketch 
of this period in his " History of England under the House of Lancaster. "] , 



Raised to the tlirone by a Parliamentary revohition and rest- 
ing its claims on a Parliamentary title, the House of Lancaster was 
precluded by its very position from any resumption of the last 
struggle for independence on the part of the Crown which had 
culminated in the bold eflbrt of Richard the Second. During no 
period of our early history were the powers of the two Houses so 
frankly recognized. The tone of Henry the Fourth till the very 
close of his reign is that of humble compliance with the prayers 
of the Parliament, and even his imperious successor shrank almost 
with timidity from any conflict with it. But the Crown had been 
bought by other pledges less noble than that of constitutional rule. 
The support of the nobles had been secured by a tacit engagement 
on Henry's part to reverse the peace jDolicy of his predecessor and 
to renew the fatal war with France. The support of the Church 
had been purchased by the more terrible promise of persecution. 
The last pledge was speedily redeemed. In the first convocation 
of his reign Henry announced himself as the protector of the 
Church, and ordered the prelates to take measures for the sup- 
pression of heresy and of the wandering preachers. The hinder- 
ances which had neutralized the efibrts of the bishops were taken 
away by an act which gave them power to arrest on common ru- 
mor, to put the accused to purgation, and to punish with impris- 
onment. These, however, were but preludes to the more formi- 
dable provisions of the Statute of Heretics. By the provisions of 
this infarnous act, bishops were now not only permitted to arrest 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



279 



and imprison, so long as their heresy should last, all preachers of 
heresy, all school-masters infected with heretical teaching, all own- 
ers or writers of heretical books, but a refusal to abjure, or a re- 
lapse after abjuration, enabled them to hand over the heretic to 
the civil officers, and by these — so ran the first legal enactment of 
religious bloodshed which defiled our statute-book — he was to be 
burned on a high place before the people. The statute was hard- 
ly passed before William Sawtre, who had quitted a Norfolk rec- 
tory to spread the new Lollardism, became its first victim. A 
layman, John Badbie, was committed to the flames in the presence 
of the Prince of Wales for a denial of transubstantiation. The 
groans of the sufiei-er were taken for a recantation, and the Prince 
ordered the fire to be plucked away ; but the offer of life and of a 
pension failed to break the spirit of the Lollard, and he was again 
hurled back to his doom. It was probably the fierce resentment 
of the Reformers which gave life to tlie incessant revolts which 
threatened the throne of Henry the Fourth. The mere mainte- 
nance of his power through the troubled years of his reign is the 
best proof of the King's ability. A conspiracy of Richard's half- 
brothers, the Earls of Huntingdon and Kent, was hardly sup- 
pressed when the discontent of the Percies at the ingratitude of a 
monarch whom they claimed to have raised to the crown broke 
out in rebellion, and Hotspur, the son of the Earl of Northumber- 
land, leagued himself with the Scots and with the insurgents of 
Wales. His defeat and death in an obstinate battle near Shrews- 
bury for a time averted the danger; but three years later his fa- 
ther rose in a fresh insurrection, and though the seizure and exe- 
cution of his fellow- conspirator Scrope, the Archbishop of York, 
drove Northumberland over the border, he remained till his death 
in a later inroad a peril to the throne. Encouraged meanwhile by 
the weakness of England, Wales, so long tranquil, shook oW the 
yoke of her conquerors, and the whole country rose at the call 
of an adventurer, Owen Glendower, or of Glendowerdy, who pro- 
claimed himself the descendant of its native princes. Owen left 
the invaders, as of old, to contend Avith famine and the mountain 
storms; but they had no sooner retired than he sallied out from 
his inaccessible fastnesses to win victories which were followed 
by the adhesion of all North Wales and great part of the South 
to his cause, while a force of French auxiliaries was dispatched by 
Charles of France to his aid. It was only the restoration of peace 
in England which enabled Henry to roll back the tide of Glen- 
dower's success. By slow and deliberate campaigns continued 
through four years the Prince of Wales wrested from him the 
South; his subjects in the North, discouraged by successive de- 
feats, gradually fell away from his standard ; and the repulse of 
a bold descent upon Shropshire drove Owen at last to take refuge 
among the mountains of Snowdon, where he seems to have main- 
tained the contest, single-handed, till his death. With the close 
of the Welsh rising the Lancastrian throne felt itself secure from 
without, but the danger from the Lollards remained as great as 
ever within. The new statute and its terrible penalties were bold- 



280 



SISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ly defied. The death of the Earl of Salisbury in one of the revolts 
against Henry, though his gory head was welcomed into London 
by a procession of abbots and bishops who had gone out singing 
psalms of thanksgiving to meet it, only transferred the leadership 
of the party to one of the foremost warriors of the time. Sir John 
Oldcastle, whose marriage raised him to the title of Lord Cobham, 
threw open his castle of Cawley to the Lollards as their head- 
quarters, sheltered their preachers, and set the prohibitions ancl 
sentences of the bishops at defiance. Although Plenry the Fourth 
died worn out with the troubles of his reign without venturing to 
cope with this formidable opponent, the stern temper of his suc- 
cessor at once faced ^he danger, A new royal mandate w^as issued 
against the preachers, and Oldcastle was besieged in his castle 
and conducted as a prisoner to the Tower. His escape was the 
signal for the revolt of his sect, A secret command summoned 
tlie Lollards to assemble in St. George's Fields, We gather, if not 
the real aims of the rising, at least the terror that it caused, from 
Henry's statement that its purpose was "to destroy himself, his 
brothers, and several of the spiritual and temporal lords ;" but 
the vigilance of the young King prevented the junction of the 
Lollards of London with their friends in the country by securing 
the city gates, and those who appeared at the place of meeting 
were dispersed by the royal forces. On the failure of the rising, 
the law was rendered more rigorous. Magistrates were directed 
to arrest all Lollai'ds and hand them over to the bishops ; a (Con- 
viction of heresy was made to entail forfeiture of blood and of 
estate; and the execution of thirty-nine prominent Lollards was 
followed after some years by the arrest of Oldcastle himself Li 
spite of his rank and of an old friendship with the King, Lord 
Cobham was hung alive in chains and a fire slowly kindled be- 
neath his feet. 

With the death of Sir John Oldcastle the political activity of 
Lollardism came suddenly to an end, while the steady persecution 
of the bishops, if it failed to extinguish it as a religious movement, 
succeeded in destroying the vigor and energy which it had shown 
at the outset of its career. But the House of Lancaster had, as 
yet, only partially accomplished the aims with which it mounted 
the throne. In the eyes of the nobles, Richard's chief crime had 
been his policy of peace, and the aid which they gave to the revo- 
lution sprang mainly from their hope of a renewal of the war. 
The energy of the war-party was seconded by the temper of the 
nation at large, already forgetful of the sufferings of the past strug- 
gle, and longing only to wipe out its shame. The internal calami- 
ties of France ofiered at this moment a tempting opportunity for 
aggression. Its king, Charles the Sixth, was a maniac, while its 
princes and nobles were divided into two great parties, the one 
headed by the Duke of Burgundy and beai-ing his name, the other 
by the Duke of Orleans and bearing the title of Armagnacs, The 
struggle had been jealously watched by Henry the Fourth, but his 
attempt to feed it by pushing an English force into France at 
once united the combatants. Their strife, however, recommenced 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



281 



more bitterly than ever when the claim of the French crown by 
Henry the Fifth on his accession declared his purpose of renew- 
ing the war. IsTo claim could have been more utterly baseless, 
for the Parliamentary title by which the House of Lancaster held 
England could give it no right over France, and the sti'ict law of 
hereditary succession which Edwai'd asserted could be pleaded, if 
pleaded at all, only by the House of Mortimer, Not only the 
claim, indeed, but the very nature of the war itself was wholly 
different from that of Edward the Third. Edward had been 
forced into the struggle against his will by the ceaseless attacks 
of France, and his claim of the crown was a mere after-thought to 
secure the alliance of Flanders. The war of Henry, on the other 
hand, though in form a mere renewal of the earlier struggle on 
the expiration of the truce made by Richard, was in :^act a wanton 
aggression on the part of a nation tempted by the helplessness of 
its opponent and still galled by the memory of former defeat. It 
was in vain that the French strove to avert the English attack 
by an offer to surrender the Duchy of Acquitaine ; Henry's aims 
pointed to the acquisition of Normandy rather than of the South, 
and his first exploit was the capture of Harfleur. Dysentery 
made havoc in his ranks during the siege, and it was Avith a mere 
handful of men that he resolved to insult the enemy by a daring 
march, like that of Edward, upon Calais. The discord, however, 
on Avhich he probably reckoned for security, vanished before the 
actual appearance of the invaders in the heart of France, and 
when his weary and half-starved force succeeded in crossing the 
Somme, it found 60,000 Frenchmen encamped right across its line 
of march. Their position, flanked on either side by woods, but 
with a front so narrow that the dense masses were drawn up 
thirty men deep, was strong for purposes of defense, but ill suited 
for attack ; and the French leaders, warned by the experience 
of Cressy and Poitiers, resolved to await the English advance. 
Henry, on the other hand, had no choice between attack and un- 
conditional surrender. His troops were starving, and the way to 
Calais lay across the French army. But the King's courage rose 
with the peril. A knight — it was said — in his train Avished that 
the thousands of stout warriors lying idle that night in England 
had been standing in his ranks. Henry answered with a burst of 
scorn. "I would not have a single man more," he replied. "If 
God give us the victory, it will be plain that we owe it to His 
grace. If not, the fewer we are, the less loss for England," Starv- 
ing and sick as were the handful of men whom he led, they shared 
the spirit of their leader. As the chill rainy night passed away, 
his archers bared their arms and breasts to give fair play to "the 
crooked stick and the gray goose wing," but for which — as the 
rhyme ran — "England were but a fling," and with a great shout 
sprang forward to the attack. The sight of their advance roused 
the fiery pride of" the French; the wise resolve of their leaders 
was forgotten, and the dense mass of men at arms plunged heavi- 
ly forward through miry ground on the English front. But at 
the first sign of movement Henry had halted his line, and fixing 



282 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



in the ground the sharp palisades with which each man was fur- 
nished, his archers poured their fatal arrow flights into the hostile 
ranks. The carnage was terrible, but the desperate charges of 
the French knighthood at last drove the English archers to the 
neighboring woods, from which they were still able to pour their 
shot into the enemy's flanks, while Henry, with the men at arms 
around him, flung himself on the French line. In the terrible 
struggle which followed the King bore off" the palm of bravery ; 
he was felled once by a blow from a French mace, and the crown 
on his helmet was cleft by the sword of the Duke of Aleu9on; but 
the enemy was at last broken, and the defeat of the main body 
of the French was followed at once by the rout of their reserve. 
The triumph was more complete, as the odds were even greater, 
than at Cressy. Eleven thousand Frenchmen lay dead on the 
field, and more than a hundred princes and great lords wei'e 
among the fallen. 

The immediate result of the battle of Agincourt was small, for 
the English army was too exhausted for pursuit, and it made its 
way to Calais only to return to England. The war was limited 
to a contest for the command of the Channel, till the increasing 
bitterness of the strife between the Burgundians and Armagnacs 
encouraged Henry to resume his attempt to recover Normandy. 
Whatever may have been his aim in this enterprise — whether it 
were, as has been suggested, to provide a refuge for his hoi,ise, 
should its power be broken in England, or simply to acquire a 
command of the seas — the patience and skill with which his ob- 
ject was accomplished raise him high in the rank of military lead- 
ers. Disembarking with an army of 40,000 men, near the mouth 
of the Touque, he stormed Caen, received the surrender of Bayeux, 
reduced Alen§on and Falaise, and detaching his brother the Duke 
of Gloucester to occupy the Cotentin, made himself master of 
Avranches and Domfront. With Lower Normandy wholly in 
his hands, he advanced upon Evreux, captured Louviers, and, seiz- 
ing Pont de I'Arche, threw his troops across the Seine. The end 
of these masterly movements was now revealed. Rouen was at 
this time the largest and wealthiest of the towns of France ; its 
walls were defended by a powerful artillery ; Alan Blanchard, a 
brave and resolute patriot, infused the fire of his own temper into 
the vast population ; and the garrison, already strong, was backed 
by 15,000 citizens in arms. But the genius of Henry Avas more 
than equal to the difliculties with which he had to deal. He had 
secured himself from, an attack on his rear by the reduction of 
Lower Normandy, his earlier occupation of Harfleur severed the 
town from the sea, and his conquest of Pont de I'Arche cut it off 
from relief on the side of Paris. Slowly but steadily the King 
drew his lines of investment round the doomed city ; a flotilla 
was brought up from Harfleur, a bridge of boats thrown over the 
Seine above the town, the deep trenches of the "besiegers protect- 
ed by posts, and the desperate sallies of the garrison stubbornly 
beaten back. For six months Rouen held resolutely out, but fam- 
ine told fast on the vast throng of country folk who had taken 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



283 



refuge within its walls. Twelve thousand of these were at last 
thrust out of the city gates, but the cold policy of the conqueror 
refused them passage, and they perished between the trenches 
and the walls. In the hour of their agony women gave birth to 
iufants, but even the new-born babes which were drawn up in 
baskets to receive baptism were lowered again to die on their 
mother's breasts. It was little better within the town itself. As 
winter drew on one half of the population wasted away. " War," 
said the terrible King, " has three handmaidens ever waiting on 
her, Fire, Blood, and Famine, and I have chosen the meekest maid 
of the three." But his demand of unconditional surrender nerved 
the citizens to a resolve of despair ; they determined to fire the city 
and fling themselves in a mass on the English lines ; and Henry, 
fearful lest his prize should escape him at the last, was driven to 
offer terms, v Those who rejected a foreign yoke were suffered 
to leave the city, but his vengeance reserved its victim in Alan 
Blanchard, and the brave patriot w\ns at Henry's orders put to 
death in cold blood. ' 

A few sieges completed the reduction of Normandy. Tlie^ 
King's designs were still limited to the acquisition of that prov- 
ince ; and pausing in his career of conquest, he strove to win its 
loyalty by a remission of taxation and a redress of grievances, 
and to seal its possession by a formal peace with the French 
Crown. The conferences, however, which were held for this pur- 
pose at Pontoise failed through the temporary reconciliation of the 
French factions, while the length and expense of the war began 
to rouse i-emonstrance and discontent at home. The King's diffi- 
culties were at their height when the assassination of the Duke 
of Burgundy at Montereau, in the very presence of the Dauphin 
with whom he had come to hold conference, rekindled the fires of 
civil strife. The whole Burgundian party, with the new duke, 
Philip the Good, at its head, flung itself in a wild thirst for re- 
venge into Henry's hands. The mad King, Charles the Sixth, 
with his queen and daughters, were in Philip's hands, and in his 
resolve to exclude the Dauphin from the throne the Duke stooped 
to buy English aid by giving Catherine, the eldest of the French 
princesses, in marriage to Henry, by conferring on him the Regen- 
cy during the life of Charles, and recognizing his succession to 
the crown at that sovereign's death. The treaty was solemnly 
ratified by Charles himself in a conference at Troyes, and Henry, 
who in his new capacity of Regent had imdertaken to conquer iij 
the name of his father-in-law the territory held by the Dauphin, 
reduced the towns of the Upper Seine, and entered Paris in tri- 
umph side by side with the King. The States-General of the 
realm were solemnly convened to the capital ; and strange as the 
provisions of the Treaty of Troyes must have seemed, they were 
confirmed without a murmur, and Henry recognized as the future 
sovereign of France. A passing defeat of his brother Clarence in 
Anjou roused him from these solemnities. His reappearance in 
the field was marked by the capture of Dreux, and a repulse be- 
fore Orleans was redeemel by his success in the long and obsti- 



284 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. V. 

The 

HoirsE or 

Lanoastee. 

1399- 

1422. 

Aug., 1422. 



nate siege of Meaiix, At no time had the fortunes of Henry 
reached a higher pitch than at the moment when he felt the 
touch of death. But the rapidity of his disease baffled the skill 
of physicians, and Avith a strangely characteristic regret that he 
had not lived to achieve the conquest of Jerusalem, the great con- 
queror passed away. 



VI-] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



285 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE NEW MONABCET. 

1422-1540. 

Section I.— Joan of Arc. 1422—1451. 

[^Authorities. — The "Wars of the English in France," and Blondel's work, "De 
Keductione Normannise," both published by the Master of the llolls, give ample in- 
formation on the military side of this period. Monstrelet remains our chief source 
of knowledge on the French side. The "Proces de Jeanne d'Arc," published by 
the Societe de I'Histoire de France, is the only real authority for her history. For 
English affairs we are reduced to the meagre accounts of William of Worcester, of 
the Continuator of the Croyland Chronicle, and of Fabyan. Fabyan, a London 
alderman with a strong bias in favor of the House of Lancaster, is useful for London 
only. The Continuator is one of the best of his class, and though connected with 
the House of York, the date of his work, which appeared soon after Bosworth Field, 
makes him fairly impartial, but he is sketchy and deficient in actual facts. The 
more copious narrative of Polydore Vergil is far superior to these in literary ability, 
but of later date, and strongly Lancastrian in tone. The Rolls of Parliament and 
Rymer are of high value during this period. Among modern writers M. Michelet, 
in his "History of France" (vol. v.), has given a portrait of the Maid of Orleans at 
once exact and full of a tender poetry. Lord Brougham ("England under the 
House of Lancaster") is still useful on constitutional points. 



The glory of Agincourt and the genius of Henry the Fifth hard- 
ly veiled at the close of his reign the weakness and humiliation of 
the Crown, hampered as it was by foreign war, by a huge debt 
amounting to nearly four millions of our money, and which increased 
each year as the expenses doubled the income, by the weakness of 
its own title and by the claims of the House of Mortimer. The 
long minority of Henry the Sixth, who was a boy nine years old 
at his father's death, as well as the personal weakness which mark- 
ed his after-rule, left the House of Lancaster at the mercy of the 
Parliament. But the Parliament was fast dying down into a' mere 
representation of the baronage and the great land -owners. The 
Commons indeed retained the right of granting and controlling 
subsidies, ot joining in all statutory enactments, and of impeaching 
ministers. But the Lower House was ceasing to be a real repre- 
sentative of the " Commons" whose name it bore. The borough 
franchise was suffering from the general tendency to restriction and 
privilege which in the bulk of towns was soon to reduce it to a 
farce. Up to this time all freemen settling in a borough and pay- 
ing their dues to it became by the mere settlement its burgesses ; 
but during the reign of Plenry the Sixth this largeness of borough 
life was roughly curtailed. The trade companies which vindicated 
civic freedom from the tyranny of the older merchant guilds them- 



286 



SISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



selves tended to become a narrow and exclusive oligarchy. Most 
of the boroughs had by this time acquired civic property, and it 
was with the aim of securing their own enjoyment of this against 
any share of it by " strangers" that the existing burgesses, for the 
most part, procured charters of incorporation from the Crown, which 
turned them into a close body, and excluded from their number all 
who were not burgesses by birth or who failed henceforth to pur- 
chase their right of entrance by a long apprenticeship. In addition 
to this narrowing of the burgess body, the internal government of 
the boroughs had almost universally passed, since the failure of the 
communal movement in the thirteenth century, from the free gather- 
ing of the citizens in borough-mote into the hands of common coun- 
cils, either self-elected or elected by the wealthier burgesses ; and it 
was to these councils, or to a yet more restricted number of " select 
men" belonging to them, that clauses in the new charters generally 
confined the right of choosing their representatives in Parliament. 
The restriction of the county franchise, on the other hand, was the 
direct work of the aristocracy. Economic changes were in fact fast 
widening the franchise in the counties when the great land-owners 
jealously interfered to curtail it. The number of freeholders had 
increased with the subdivision of estates and the social changes 
which we have already examined, while the increase of independ- 
ence Avas marked by the "riots and divisions between the gentle- 
men and other people," which the nobles attributed to the excessive 
number of the voters. Matters were in this state when by an early 
act of the reign of Henry the Sixth the right of voting in shires 
was restricted to freeholders holding land worth forty shillings (a 
sum equal in our money to at least twenty pounds) a year, and rep- 
resenting a far higher proportional income* at the present time. 
This "great disfranchising statute," as it has been justly termed, 
was aimed, in its own words, against voters " of no value, whereof 
every of them j^retended to have a voice equivalent with the more 
worthy knights and esquires dwelling within the same counties," 
But in actual working the statute was interpreted in a far more de- 
structive fashion than its words were intended to convey. Up to 
this time all suitors who found themselves at the Sheriff's Court 
had voted without question for the knight of the shire, but by the 
ne\Y statute the great bulk of the existing voters, that is to say the 
leaseholders and copy-holders, found themselves implicitly deprived 
of their franchise. A later statute, which seems, however, to have 
had no practical effect, showed the aristocratic temper, as well as 
the social changes against which it struggled, in its requirement 
that every knight of the shire should be " a gentleman born." The 
restriction of the suffrage was soon followed by its corruption in 
the "management" of elections. The complaint of the Kentish- 
men in Cade's revolt alleges that "the people of the shire are not 
allowed to have their free election in the choosing of knights for the 
shire, but letters have been sent from divers estates to the great 
rulers of all the county, the which enforceth their tenants and other 
people by force to choose other persons than the common will is." 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



287 



The death of Henry the Fifth revealed in its bare reality the se- 
cret of poAver. The whole of the royal authority vested without a 
struggle in a council composed of great lords and churchmen rep- 
resenting the baronage, at whose head stood Henry Beaufort, Bish- 
op of Chichester, a legitimated son of John of Gaunt by his mis- 
tress Catherine Swynford. In the presence of Lollardism, the 
Church had at this time ceased to be a great political power and 
sunk into a mere section of the landed aristocracy. Its one aim 
was to preserve its enormous wealth, which was threatened at once 
by the hatred of the heretics and by the greed of the nobles._ Lol- 
lardism still lived in spite of the steady persecution, as a spirit of 
revolt ; and nine years after the young King's accession we find 
the Duke of Gloucester traversing England with men at arms for 
the purpose of repressing its risings and hindering the circulation 
of its invectives against the clergy. The greed of the nobles had 
been diverted, whether, as later legend said, by the deliberate de- 
vice of the great churchmen or no, to the fair field of France. For 
.the real source of the passion with which the baronage pressed for 
war was sheer lust of gold. Whatever pulse of patriotism may 
have stirred the blood o"f the English archer at Agincourt, the aim 
of the English noble was simply plunder, the pillage of farms, the 
sack of cities, the ransom of captives. So intense was the greed of 
gain that only a threat of death could keep the fighting men in 
their ranks, and the results' of victory after victory were lost by the 
anxiety of the conquerors to deposit their plunder and captives 
safely at home before reaping the more military fruits of their suc- 
cess. The moment the firm hand of great leaders such as Henry or 
Bedford was removed, the war died down into mere massacre and 
brigandage. " If God had been a captain nowadays," exclaimed a 
French general, "He would have turned marauder." Cruelty went 
hand in hand with greed, and we find an English privateer coolly 
proposing to drown the crews of a hundred mei'chant vessels which 
he has taken, unless the council to whom he writes should think it 
better to spare their lives. The nobles were as lawless and disso- 
lute at home as they were greedy and cruel abroad. The Parlia- 
ments, which had now become mere sittings of their retainers and 
partisans, were like armed camps to which the great lords came 
with small armies at their backs. That of 1426 received its name 
of the " Club Parliament," from the fact that when arms were pro- 
hibited the retainers of the barons appeared with clubs on their 
shoulders. When clubs were forbidden, they hid stones and balls 
of lead in their clothes. The dissoluteness against which Lollardism 
had raised its great moral protest reigned now without a check. 
A gleam of intellectual light was breaking on the darkness of the 
time, but only to reveal its hideous combination of mental energy 
with moral worthlessness. The Duke of Gloucester, whose love of 
letters was shown in the noble library he collected, was the most 
selfish and profligate prince of his day. The Earl of Worcester, a 
patron of Caxton, and one of the earliest scholars of the revival 
of letters, earned his title of " butcher" by the cruelty which raised 



Sec. I. 

Joan of 
Akc. 

1422- 
1451. 

England 

luider tlxe 

nobles. 



288 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



him to a pre-eminence of infamy among the blood-stained leaders 
of the Wars of the Roses. All spiritual life seemed to have been 
trodden out in the ruin of the Lollards. Never had English litera- 
ture fallen so low. A few tedious moralists alone preserved the 
name of poetry. History died down into the barest and most 
worthless fragments and annals. Even the religious enthusiasm of 
the peoj)le seemed to have spent itself, or to have been crushed 
out by the bishops' courts. The one belief of the time was in sor- 
cery and magic. Eleanor Cobham, the wife of the Duke of Glouces- 
ter, was convicted of having practiced magic against the King's 
life with the priests of her household, and condemned to do pen- 
ance in the streets of London. The shriveled arm of Richard the 
Third was attributed to witchcraft. The mist which wrapped the 
battle-field of Barnet Avas attributed to the incantations of Friar 
Bungay. The one pure figure which rises out of the greed, the 
lust, the selfishness and unbelief of the time, the figure of Joan of 
Arc, was regarded by every Englishman as that of a sorceress. 

Jeannette d'Arc was the child of a laborer of Domremy, a little 
village in the neighborhood of Vaucouleurs on the borders of Lor- 
raine and Champagne, in other words of France and of the empire. 
Just witliout the little cottage where she was born began the great 
woods of the Vosges, where the children of Domremy drank in 
poetry and legend from fairy ring and haunted well, hung their 
flower garlands on the sacred trees, and sang songs to the " good 
people" who might not drink of the fountain because of their feins. 
Jeanne loved the forest ; its birds and beasts came lovingly to her 
at her childish call. But at home men saw nothing in her but " a 
good girl, simple and pleasant in her M'ays," spinning and sewing 
by her mother's side while the other girls went to the fields, tender 
to the poor and sick, fond of church, and listening to the church-bell 
with a dreamy passion of delight which never left her. The quiet 
life was soon broken by the storm of war as it at last came home 
to Domremy. The death of Charles the Sixth, which followed 
hard on that of Henry, greatly weakened the moral force of the 
English cause ; and the partisans of the Dauphin, who still held - 
his ground south of the Loire, pushed their incursions over the 
river with fresh vigor as they received reinforcements of Lom- 
bards from the Milanese, and of four thousand Scots who landed at 
Rochelle under the Earl of Douglas. In genius for war, however, 
and in political capacity, the Duke of Bedford, who had taken the 
command in France on his brother's death, was hardly inferior to 
Henry himself. Drawing closer by a patient diplomacy his alli- 
ances with the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, he completed the 
conquest of Noitliern France, secured his communication with Nor- 
mandy by the capture of Meulan, made himself master of the line of 
the Yonne by a victory near Auxerre, and pushed forward into the 
country near Macon, It was to arrest his progress that the Con- 
stable of Buchan advanced boldly from the Loire to the very bor- 
ders of Normandy and attacked the English army at Verneuil, But 
a repulse hardly less disastrous than that of Agincourt left a third 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



289 



of the French knighthood on the field ; and the Regent was prepar- 
ing to cross the Loire, when he was hindered by the intrigues of his 
brother the Duke of Gloucester. The nomination of Gloucester to 
the Regency in England by the will of the late King had been set 
aside by the council, and sick of the powerless Protectorate with 
which they had invested him, the duke sought a new opening for 
his restless ambition in a marriage with Jacqueline; the Countess in 
her own right of Holland and Hainault. The match at once roused 
the jealousy of the Duke of Burgundy, who regarded himself as the 
lieir of her dominions, and the efforts of Bedford were paralyzed by 
the withdrawal of his allies as they marched northward to combat 
his brother. For three years the council strove in vain to put an 
end to the ruinous struggle, during which Bedford was forced to 
remain simply on the defensive, till the failure of Gloucester again 
restored to him the aid of Burgundy, and he was once more able 
to push forward to the conquest of the South. The delay, howev- 
er, brought little help to France, and the Dauphin saw Orleans in- 
vested by ten thousand of the allies without power to march to 
its relief. The war had long since reached the borders of Lorraine, 
and the family of Jeanne had more than once been forced to fly to 
the woods before bands of marauders, and find their home burned 
and sacked on their return. The whole North of France, indeed, 
from the Lorraine to the German border was being fast reduced to 
a desert. The husbandmen fled for refuge to the towns, till these, 
in fear of famine, shut their gates against them. Then in their de- 
spair they threw themselves into the woods and became brigands 
in their turn. So terrible was the devastation, that the two con- 
tending armies at one time failed even to find one another in the 
desolate Beauce. The towns were in hardly better case, for misery 
and disease killed a hundred thousand people in Paris alone. As 
the outcasts and wounded passed by, Domremy the young peasant 
girl gave them her bed and nursed them in their sickness. Her 
whole nature summed itself up in one absorbing passion : she "had 
pity," to use the phrase forever on her lip, " on the fair realm of 
France." As her passion grew she recalled old prophecies that a 
maid from the Lorraine border should save the land ; she saw vis- 
ions ;' St. Michael appeared to her in a flood of blinding light, and 
bade her go to the help of the King and restore to him his realm. 
" Messire," answered the girl, " I am but a poor maiden ; I know 
not how to ride to the wars, or to lead men at arms." The archan- 
gel returned to give her courage, and to tell her of "the pity" that 
there was in heaven for the fair realm of France. The girl wept, 
and longed that the angels who had appeared to her would carry her 
away, but her mission was clear. It was in vain that her father 
when he heard her purpose swore to drown her ere she should go 
to the field with men at arras. It was in vain that the priest, the 
wise people of the village, the captain of Vaucouleurs, doubted and 
refused to aid her. " I must go to the King," persisted the peas- 
ant girl, " even if I wear ray limbs to the very knees. I had far 
rather rest and spin by my mother's side," she pleaded with a touch- 

19 



290 



EISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ing pathos, " foi' tliis is no work of my choosing, but I must go and 
do it, for my Lord wills it." "And who?" they asked, "is your 
Lord?" "He is God." Words such as these touched the rough 
cajitaiu at last: he took Jeanne by the hand, and swore to lead her 
to the King. At the Court itself she found hesitation and doubt. 
The theologians proved from their books that they ought not to be- 
lieve her. " There is more in God's book than in yours," Jeanne 
answered simply. At last the Dauphin received her in the midst 
of a throng of nobles and soldiers. " Gentle Dauphin," said the girl, 
" my name is Jehan the Maid. The Heavenly King sends me to tell 
you that you shall be anointed and crowned in the town of Rheims, 
and you shall be lieutenant of the Heavenly King who is the King of 
France." 

Orleans had already been driven by famine to offers of surren- 
der when Jeanne appeared in the French Court. Charles had done 
nothing for its aid but shut himself up at Chinon and weejD help- 
lessly. The long series of English victories had in fact so demor- 
alized the French soldiery that a mere detachment of archers un- 
der Sir John Fastolfe had repulsed an army, in what was called the 
" Battle of the Herrings," and conducted the convoy of provisions 
to Avhich it owed its name in triumph into the camp before Oi'- 
leans. Only two or three thousand Englishmen remained there in 
the trenches after a new withdrawal of their Burgundian aWies, but 
though the town swarmed with men at arms not a single sally had 
been ventured upon during the six months' siege. The success, how- 
ever, of the handful of English besiegers depended wholly on the 
spell of terror which they had cast over France, and the appearance 
of Jeanne at once broke the spell. The girl was in her eighteenth 
year, tall, finely formed, with all the vigor and activity of her peas- 
ant rearing, able to stay from dawn to night-fall on horseback with- 
out meat or drink. As she mounted her charger, clad in white 
armor from head to foot, with the great white banner studded with 
fleur-de-lys waving over her head, she seemed "a thing wholly 
divine, whether to see or hear." The ten thousand men at arms 
who followed her from Chinon, rough plunderers whose only 
prayer was that of La Hire, " Sire Dieu, I pray you to do for La 
Hire what La Hii-e would do for you, were you captain at arms and 
he God," left off their oaths and foul living at her word and gath- 
ered round the altars on their march. Her shrewd peasant humor 
helped her to manage the wild soldiery, and her followers laughed 
over their camp-fires at the old warrior who had been so puzzled by 
her prohibition of oaths that she suffered him still to swear by his 
baton. In the midst of her enthusiasm her good sense never left 
her. The people crowded round her as she rode along, praying her 
to Avork miracles, and bringing crosses and chaplets to be blessed 
by her touch. " Touch them yourself," she said to an old Dame 
Margaret; "your touch will be just as good as mine." But her 
faith in her mission remained as firm as ever. "The Maid prays 
and requires you," she wrote to Bedford, " to Avork no more dis- 
ti'action in Fi'ance, but to come in her company to rescue the Holy 



VI.] 



TEE NEW MONARCHY. 



291 



Sepulchre from the Turk." "I bring you," she told Dunois when 
he sallied out of Orleans to meet her, " the best aid ever sent to any 
one, the aid of the King of Heaven." The besiegers looked on 
overawed as she led her force unopposed through their lines into 
Orleans, and, riding round the walls, bade the people look fearlessly 
on the dreaded forts which surrounded them. Her enthusiasm drove 
the hesitating generals to engage the handful of besiegers, and the 
enormous disproportion of forces at once made itself felt. Fort 
after fort was taken, till only the Tournelle remained, and then the 
council of war resolved to adjourn the attack. "You have taken 
your counsel," replied Jeanne, " and I take mine." Placing herself 
at the head of the men at arms, she ordered the gates to be thrown 
open, and led them against the fort. Few as they were, the En- 
glish fought desperately, and the Maid, who had_ fallen wounded 
while endeavoring to scale its walls, was borne into a vineyard, 
while Dunois sounded the retreat. " Wait a while !" the girl im- 
periously pleaded ; " eat and drink ! so soon as my standard touches 
the wall you shall enter the fort." It touched, and the assailants 
burst in. On the next day the siege was abandoned, and the force 
which had conducted it withdrew in good order to the North. In 
the midst of her triumph Jeanne still remained the pure, tender- 
hearted peasant girl of the Vosges. Her first visit as she entered 
Orleans was to the great chui'ch, and there, as she knelt at mass, 
she wept in such a passion of devotion that " all the people Avept 
Avith her." Her tears burst forth afresh at her first sight of blood- 
shed and of the corpses strewn over the battle-field. She grew 
frightened at her first wound, and only threw off the touch of 
womanly fear when she heard the signal for retreat. Yet more 
womanly was the purity with which she passed through the brutal 
warriors of a mediaeval camp. It Avas her care for her honor that 
had led her to clothe herself in a soldier's dress. She wept hot 
tears when told of the foul taunts of the English, and called pas- 
sionately on God to Avitness her chastity. "Yield thee, yield thee, 
Gledstane," she cried to the English Avarrior whose insults had 
been foulest, as he fell wounded at her feet, "you called me hai'lot ! 
I have great pity on your soul." But all thought of herself was 
lost in the thought of her mission. It Avas in vain that the French 
generals strove to remain on the Loire. Jeanne was resolute to 
complete her task, and Avhile the English remained panic-stricken 
around Paris the army folloAved her from Gien through Troyes, 
growing in number as it advanced, till it reached the gates of 
Rheims. With the coronation of the Dauphin the Maid felt her 
errand to be over. " O gentle King, the pleasure of God is done," 
she cried, as she flung herself at the feet of Charles the Seventh 
and asked leave to go home. " Would it were His pleasure," she 
pleaded with the Archbishop as he forced her to remain, " that I 
might go and keep sheep once more with my sisters and my broth- 
ers ; they Avould be so glad to see me again !" 

The policy of the French Court detained her while the cities of 
the North of France opened their gates to the newly-consecrated 



292 



HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[ClIAP. 



King. Bedford, however, who had been left without money or 
men, had now received reinforcements, and Charles, after a repulse 
before the walls of Paris, fell back behind the Loire ; while the 
towns on the Oise submitted again to the Duke of Burgundy. In 
this later struggle Jeanne fought with her usual bravery, but with 
the fatal consciousness that her mission was at an end, and during 
the defense of Compiegne she fell into the hands of the Bastard of 
Vendome, to be sold by her captor into the hands of the Duke of 
Burgundy, and by the Duke into the hands of the English. To the 
English her triumphs were victories of sorcery, and after a year's 
imprisonment she was brought to trial on a charge of heresy before 
an ecclesiastical court, with the Bishop of Beauvais at its head* 
Throughout the long process which followed every art was em- 
ployed to entangle her in her talk. But the simple shrewdness of 
the peasant girl foiled the efforts of her judges. " Do you believe," 
they asked, " that you are in a state of peace ?" " If I am not," 
she replied, " God will put me in it. If I am, God will keep me in 
it." Her capture, they argued, showed that God had forsaken her. 
" Since it has pleased God that I should be taken," she answered 
meekly, "it is for the best." "Will you submit," they demanded 
at last, " to the judgment of the Church Militant?" " I have come 
to the King of France," Jeanne rei:)lied, " by commission from God 
and from the Church Triumphant above: to that Church I submit." 
" I had far rather die," she ended, passionately, " than renounce 
what I have done by my Lord's command." They deprived her 
of mass. " Our Lord can make me hear it without your aid," she 
said, weeping. "Do your voices," asked the judges, "forbid you 
to submit to tlie Church and the Pope ?" "Ah, no ! Our Lord Urst 
served." Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it was no wonder 
that as the long trial dragged on and question followed question 
Jeanne's firmness wavered. On the charge of sorcery and diabol- 
ical possession she still appealed firmly to God. " I hold to my 
Judge," she said, as her earthly judges gave sentence against her, 
"to the King of Heaven and Earth. God has always been my 
Lord in all that I have done. The devil has never had power over 
me." It was only with a view to be delivered from the Englisli 
prison and transferred to the prisons of the Church that she con- 
sented to a formal abjuration of heresy. She feared in fact among 
the English soldiery those outrages to her honor, to guard against 
which she had from the first assumed the dress of a man. In the 
eyes of the Church her dress was a crime, and she abandoned it ; 
but a renewed insult forced her to resume the one safeguard left 
her, and the return to it was treated as a relapse into heresy which 
doomed her to death. A great pile was raised in the market-place 
of Rouen where her statue stands now. Even the brutal soldiers 
who snatched the hated " witch" from the hands of the clergy and 
hurried her to her doom were hushed as she reached the stake. 
One indeed passed to her a rough cross he had made from a stick 
beheld, and she clasped it to her bosom. "Oh! Rouen, Rouen," 
she was heard to murmur, as her eyes ranged over the city from 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



293 



the lofty scaffold, "I have great fear lest you suffer for my death." 
"Yes ! my voices were of God !" she suddenly ci"ied as the last mo- 
ment came; "they have never deceived me!" Soon the flames 
reached her, tlie girl's head sunk on her breast, there was one cry 
of "Jesus!" "We are lost," an English soldier muttered as the 
crowd broke up, " we have burned a saint." 

The English cause Avas 'indeed irretrievably lost. In spite of a 
pompous coronation of their boy-king at Paris, Bedford, with the 
cool wisdom of his temper, seems to have abandoned all hope of per- 
manently retaining France, and to have fallen back on his brother's 
original plan of securing Normandy. Henry's Court was establish- 
ed "for a year at Rouen, a university founded at Caen, and whatever 
rapine and disorder might be permitted elsewhere, justice, good 
government, and security for trade were resolutely maintained 
through the favored province. At home Bedford was resolutely 
backed by the Bishop of Winchester, Avho had been raised to the 
rank of cardinal, and who still governed England through the Roy- 
al Council in spite of the fruitless struggles of the Duke of Glouces- 
ter. His immense wealth was poured without stint into the ex- 
hausted treasury; his loans to the Crown amounted to half a 
million ; and the army which he had raised at his own cost for the 
Hussite Crusade in Bohemia Avas unscrupulously diverted to the 
relief of Bedford after the deUvery of Orleans. The Cardinal's dip- 
lomatic ability was seen in the truces he wrung from Scotland, and 
in his personal efforts to prevent the reconciliation of Burgundy 
with France. But the death of Bedford was a death-blow to the 
EngUsh cause. Burgundy allied itself with Charles the Seventh ; 
Paris, after a sudden revolt, surrendered to the King ; and the En- 
glish dominions Avere at once reduced to Normandy and the for- 
tresses of Picardy, Maine, and Anjou. To preserve these, the En- 
glish soldiers, shrunk as they AA^ere to a mere handful, struggled Avith 
a bravery as desperate as in their days of triumph. Lord Talbot, 
the most daring of their chiefs, forded the Somme with the Avaters 
up to his chin to relicA^e Crotoy, and thrcAV his men across the Oise 
in the face of a French army to relieve Pontoise. But in spite of 
these efforts and of the pressure of the war-party at home, the great 
churchmen, Avho, though Aveakened by Beaufort's retirement, still 
remained at the head of affairs, saw that success Avas no longer pos- 
sible. They offered in vain to fall back on the terms of the Treaty 
of Bretigny ; and after the expiration of a short truce, which they 
purchased by the release of the Duke of Orleans,. a fresh effort for 
peace was made by the Earl of Suffolk, who had noAv become the 
minister of Henry the Sixth, and negotiated for his master a mar- 
riage with Marguerite of Anjou. Her father, Rene, the titular King 
of Sicily and Jerusalem, AA'as also nominally duke of the provinces 
of Maine and Anjou, and these Avere surrendered by the English 
minister as the price of a match which_Suffolk regarded as the pre- 
lude to a final peace. A terrible crime secured the peace party from 
the opposition of the Duke of Gloucester, Avho had resumed his old 
activity on the retirement of Cardinal Beaufort, and had now placed 



294 



EISTOBY OF TRE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



himself at the head of the partisans of the war ; he was summoned 
to attend a Parliament at St. Edniundsbury, charged with high trea- 
son, and a few days after found dead in his bed. But the difficulties 
he had raised foiled Suffolk in his negotiations ; and though Charles 
extorted the surrender of Le Mans by a threat of war, the provisions 
of the treaty remained for the most part unfulfilled. The struggle, 
however, now became a hopeless one. In two mouths from the re- 
sumption of the war half Normandy was in the hands of Dunois ; 
Rouen rose against her feeble garrison, and threw open her gates 
to the King ; and the defeat of three thousand Englishmen who 
had landed at Fourmigny was the signal for revolt throughout the 
rest of the province. The surrender of Cherbourg left Plenry not a 
foot of ground in Normandy, but the views of the French monarch 
reached south of the Loire, where Guienne was still loyal to the 
English Crown. But not a man arrived for its defense ; and the 
surrender of fortress after fortress secured the final expulsion of 
the English from the soil of France. The Hundred Years' War 
had ended, not only in the loss of the temporary conquests made 
since the time of Edward the Third, with the exception of Calais, 
but in the loss of the great southern province which had remained 
in English hands ever since the marriage of its duchess, Eleanor, to 
Henry the Second, and in the building up of France into a far great- 
er power than it had ever been before. 



Section II.— The Wars of the Koses. 1450—1411. 

[Authorities. — No period, save the last, is scantier in historical authorities. "We 
still possess William of Worcester, Fabyan, and the Croyland Continuator, and for 
the struggle between Warwick and Edward, the valuable narrative of "The Ariival 
of Edwai-d the Fourth," edited by Mr. Bruce for the Camden Society, which may be 
taken as the official account on the royal side. " The Paston Letters" (now admira- 
bly edited by Mr. Gardner) are the first instance in England of a distinct family cor- 
respondence, and throw great light on the social history of the time. Cade's rising 
has been illustrated in two papers, lately reprinted, by Mr. Durrant Cooper. The 
KoUs of Parliament are, as before, of the highest value.] 



The ruinous issue of the great struggle with France roused En- 
gland to a burst of fury against the wretched government to whose 
weakness and credulity it attributed its disasters. Suffolk was im- 
peached and murdered as he fled across sea. The Bishop of Chi- 
chester, who had negotiated the cession of Anjou, was seized by the 
populace and torn to pieces. In Kent, the great manufacturing dis- 
trict of the day, seething with a busy population, and especially 
concerned with the French contest through the piracy of the Cinque 
Ports, where every house showed some spoil from the wars, the dis- 
content broke into open revolt. Yeomen and tradesmen formed 
the bulk of the insurgents, but they., were joined by more than a 
hundred esquires and gentlemen, and two great land-owners of Suf- 
folk, the Abbot of Battle and the Prior of Lewis, openly favored 
their cause. John Cade, a soldier of some experience in the French 



VL] 



THE NEW MONABCRY. 



295 



wars, was placed at their head, and the army, now twenty thousand 
men strong, inarched iu Whitsun-week on Blackheath. The " Com- 
plamt of the Commons of Kent," which they laid before the Royal 
Council, is of enormous value in the light which it throws on the 
condition of the people. So utterly had Lollardism been extinguish- 
ed that not one of the demands touches on religious reform. The 
old social discontent seems to have subsided. The question of vil- 
lainage and serfage, which had roused Kent to its desperate rising 
in 1381, finds no place in its "complaint" of 1450. In the seventy 
years which had intervened, villainage had died naturally away be- 
fore the progress of social change. The Statutes of Apparel, which 
begin at this time to encumber the Statute-Book, show, in their anx- 
iety to curtail the dress of the laborer and the farmer, the progress 
of these classes in comfort and wealth ; and from the language of 
the statutes themselves, it is plain that as wages rose both farmer 
and laborer went on clothing themselves better in spite of sumptu- 
ary provisions. With the exception of a demand for the repeal of 
the Statute of Laborers, the programme of the Commons was now 
not social, but political. The " complaint" calls for administrative 
and economical reforms, for a change of ministry, a more careful 
expenditure of the royal revenue, and, as we have seen, for the res- 
toration of freedom of election, which had been broken in upon by 
the interference both of the Crown and the great land-owners. The 
refusal of the Council to receive the " complaint" was followed by 
a victory of the Kentishmen over the royal forces at Sevenoaks; 
and the occupation of London, coupled with the execution of Lord 
Say, the most unpopular of the royal ministers, broke the obstinacy 
of his colleagues. The " complaint" was received, and pardons 
granted to all who had joined in the rising; but the insurgents 
were hardly dispersed to their homes, when Cade, who had striven 
in vain to retain them in arms, was pursued and slain as he fled into 
Sussex. No bloody retaliation followed on the death of the chief 
of the revolt, but the "complaint" was quietly laid aside, and the 
Duke of Somerset, who was especially regarded as responsible for 
the late misgovernment, resumed his place at the head of the Royal 
Council. 

Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, as the descendant of John of Gaunt 
and his mistress Qatherine Swynford, was the representative of a 
junior branch of the House of Lancaster, excluded indeed from the 
thi'one by a special clause in the act which legitimatized their line, 
but whose hopes of the Crown were now roused by tlie childless- 
ness of Henry the Sixth. It was probably a suspicion of their de- 
signs which stirred the Duke of York to action. In addition to 
other claims which he as yet refrained from urging, he claimed, as 
the descendant of Edmund of Langley, the fifth among the sons of 
Edward the Third, to be regarded as heir presumptive to the throne. 
His claim seems to have been a popular one, and on the interruption 
of the struggle between the two rivals by the severe malady of the 
King who sank for a year into absolute incapacity, the vote of Parlia- 
ment appointed York Protector of the Realm. On Henry's recovery, 



296 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



howevei", the Dnke of Somerset, who had been impeached and com- 
mitted to the Tower by his rival, was restored to power, and sup- 
ported with singular vigor and audacity by the Queen. York at 
once took up arms, and, backed by some of the most powerful no- 
bles, advanced with 3000 men upon St. Albans, where Henry was 
encamped. A successful assault upon the town was crowned by the 
fall of Somerset, and a return of the King's malady brought the re~ 
newal of York's protectorate. Henry's recovery, however, again 
restored the supremacy of the House of Beaufort, and after a tem- 
porary reconciliation between the two parties York again raised his 
standard at Ludlow, where he was joined by the Earls of Salisbury 
and Warwick, the heads of the great house of Neville. After a 
slight success gained over Lord Audley at Bloreheath, the King 
marched rapidly on the insurgents, and a decisive battle was only 
averted by the desertion of a part of the Yorkist army and the dis- 
bandnient of the rest. The Duke himself fled to Ireland, the earls 
to Calais, while the Queen, summoning a Parliament at Coventry, 
pressed on their attainder. But the check, whatever its cause, had 
been merely a temporary one. In the following midsummer the 
earls again landed in Kent, and, backed by a general rising of the 
county, entered London amid the acclamations of its citizens. The 
royal army was defeated in a hard-fought action at Northampton, 
Margaret fled to Scotland, and Henry was left a prisoner in tlie 
hands of the Duke of York. 

The position of York as heir presumptive to the crown had 
ceased with the birth of a son to Henry the Sixth ; but the victory 
of ISTorthampton no sooner raised him to the supreme control of af- 
fairs than he ventured to assert the far more dangei'ous claims 
which he had secretly cherished, and to its consciousness of which 
was owing the bitter hostility of the royal house. As the de- 
scendant of Edmund of Langley, he stood only next in succession 
to the House of Lancaster ; but as the descendant of Lionel, the 
elder brother of John of Gaunt, he stood in strict hereditary right 
before it. We have already seen how the claims of Lionel had pass- 
ed to the House of Mortimer : it \vas through Anne, the heiress of 
the Mortimers, who had Avedded his father, that they passed to the 
Duke. There was, however, no constitutional ground for any lim- 
itation of the right of Parliament to set aside an elder branch in 
favor of a younger, and in tlie Parliamentary Act which placed the 
House of Lancaster on the throne the claim of the House of Mor- 
timer had been deliberately set aside. Possession, too, told against 
the Yorkist pretensions. To modern minds the best reply to their 
claim lay in the words used at a later time by Henry himself. 
" My father was king ; his father also was king ; I myself have 
worn the crown forty years from my cradle; you have all sworn 
fealty to me as your sovereign, and your fathers have done the 
like to mine. How, then, can my right be disputed ?" Long and 
undisturbed possession, as well as a distinctly legal title by free 
vote of Parliament, was in favor of the House of Lancaster. But 
the persecution of the Lollards, the disfranchisement of the voter, 



VI.] 



TEE NEW MONABCRY. 



297 



the interference with elections, the odium of the war, the shame of 
the long misgovernment told fatally against the weak and imbecile 
King, whose reign had been a long battle of contending factions. 
That the misrule had been serious was shown by the attitude of the 
commercial class. It was the rising of Kent, the great manufactur- 
ing district of the realm, which brought about the victory of North- 
ampton. Throughout the struggle which followed, London and the 
great merchant towns were steady for the house of York. Zeal 
for the Lancastrian cause was found only in the wild Welsh border- 
lands or in the yet wildei; districts of the North and the West. It 
is absurd to suppose that the shrewd traders of Cheapside were 
moved by an abstract question of hereditary right, or that the rough 
borderers of the Marches believed themselves to be supporting the 
right of Parliament to regulate the succession. But it marks the 
power which Parliament had now gained that the Duke of York 
felt himself compelled to convene the two Houses, and to lay his 
claim before the Lords as a petition of right. Neither oaths nor 
the numerous acts which had settled and confirmed the right to 
the crown in the House of Lancaster could destroy, he pleaded, his 
hereditary claim. The baronage received the petition with hardly 
concealed reluctance, and solved the question, as they hoped, by a 
compromise. They refused to dethrone the King, but they had 
sworn no fealty to his child, and at Henry's death they agreed to 
receive the Duke as successor to the crown. But the open display 
of York's pretensions at once united the partisans of the royal 
house, and the deadly struggle which received the name of the 
AYars of the Roses, from the white rose which formed the badge of 
the House of York, and the red rose, which was the cognizance of 
the House of Lancaster, began in the gathering of the Nortli round 
Lord Clifl'ord, and of the West round the new Duke of Somerset. 
York, who had hurried to meet the first with a far inferior force, 
was defeated and captured at Wakefield, and the passion of civil 
war broke fiercely out on the field. The Duke was hurried to the 
block, and his head, crowned in mockery with a diadem of paper, is 
said to have been impaled on the walls of York. His boy, Lord 
Rutland, fell crying for mercy on bis knees before Clifford. But 
Clifford's father had been the first to fall in the battle of St. Albans, 
which opened the struggle. "As your father killed mine," cried 
the savage baron while he plunged his dagger in the boy's breast, 
"I will kill you !" A force of Kentishmen under the Earl of War- 
wick barred the march of the conquerors on London, but after a 
desperate struggle at St. Albans the Yorkist forces broke under cov- 
er of night. An immediate march on the capital Avould have de- 
cided the contest, but the conquerors paused to sully their vic- 
tory by a ^mes of bloody executions, and the rough Northerners, 
Avhom Margaret had* brought up, scattered to pillage, while Ed- 
ward, Earl of March,*the son of the late Duke of York, who had cut 
his M-ay through abo(?y of Lancastrians at Mortimei*'s Cross, struck 
boldly upon London. The citizens rallied at his call, and cries of 
" Long live King Edward" rang round the handsome young leader 

f 



298 



HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[CiiAr. 



as he rode througli the streets. A council of Yorkist lords, hastily 
summoned, resolved that the compromise agreed on in Parliament 
was at an end, and that Henry of Lancaster had forfeited the throne. 
The final issue, however, now lay not with Parliament, but with the 
sword. Disappointed of London, the Lancastrian army fell rapid- 
ly back on the North, and Edward hurried as rapidly in pursuit. 

The two armies encountered one another at Towton Field, near 
Tadcaster. In the numbers engaged, as well as in the terrible ob- 
stinacy of the struggle, no such battle had been seen in England 
since the fight of Senlac. On either side the armies numbered 
nearly 60,000 men. The day had just broken when the Yorkists 
advanced through a thick snow-fall, and for six hours the battle 
raged with desperate bravery on either side. At one critical mo- 
ment Warwick saw his men falter, and, stabbing his horse before 
them, swore on the cross of his sword to live or die on the field. 
At last the Lancastrians slowly gave way; a river in their rear 
turned the retreat into a rout ; and the flight and carnage, for no 
quarter was given on either side, went on through the night and 
the morrow. Of the conquered, Edward's herald counted more 
than 20,000 corpses on the field, and the losses of the conqueroi's 
were hardly less heavy. Six barons had fallen in the fight; the 
Earls of Devon and Wiltshire were taken and beheaded at its close ; 
an enormous bill of attainder wrapped in the same ruin and con- 
fiscation all the nobles who still adhered to the House of Lancaster, 
and the execution of Lords Oxford and Aubery gave a terrible 
significance to its clauses. The struggles of Margaret only served 
to bring fresh calamities on her adherents. A new rising in the 
North was crushed by the Earl of Warwick, and a legend which 
lights up the gloom of the time with a gleam of poetry told how 
the fugitive Queen, after escaping with difliculty from a troop of 
bandits, found a new brigand in the depths of the wood. With 
the daring of despair she confided to him her child. "I trust to 
your loyalty," she said, " the son of your King.'^ Margaret and 
her child escaped over the border under the robber's guidance, but 
a new rising in the following year brought about the execution of 
Somerset and flung Henry into the hands of his enemies. His feet 
were tied to the stirrups, he was let thrice round the pillory, and 
then conducted as a prisoner to the Tower. 

Ruined as feudalism really was by the terrible bloodshed and 
confiscations of the civil war, it had never seemed so powerful as in 
the years which followed Towton. Out of the wreck of the baron- 
age a family which had always stood high among its fellows tower- 
ed into unrivaled greatness. Lord Warwick was by descent Earl 
of SaHsbury, a son of the great noble whose support had been 
mainly instrumental in raising the House of York tt)*the throne. 
He had doubled his wealth and influence by his acquisition of the 
earldom of Warwick, through a marriage with the heiress of the 
Beauchamps. His services at Towton had been munificently re- 
warded by the grant of vast estates from the Lancastrian confisca- 
tions and by his elevation to the highest posts in the service of the 



.VI-] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



299 



state. He was governor of Calais, lieutenant of Ireland, and ward- 
en of the Western Marches. This personal power was backed by 
the power of the House of ISTeville, of which he was the head. 
Lords Falconberg, Abergavenny, and Latimer were his uncles. His 
brother. Lord Montagu, had received as his share in the spoil the 
earldom of Northumberland, the estates of the Percies, and the 
command of the Northern border. His younger brother, George, 
had been raised to the see of York and the office of lord chancel- 
lor. At first sight the figure of Warwick strikes us as the very 
type of the feudal baron. He could raise ai-mies at his call from 
his own earldoms. Six hundred liveried retainers followed him to 
Parliament. His fame as a military leader had been established by 
the great victories which crushed the House of Lancaster, as well 
as by the crowning glory of Towton. Yet few men were ever fur- 
ther, in fact, from the feudal ideal. Active, skillful, ruthless war- 
rior as he was, Warwick — if we believe his contemporaries — had 
little personal daring. In war he was rather general than soldier. 
His genius, in fact, was not so much military as diplomatic ; what 
he excelled in was intrigue, treachery, the contrivance of plots, and 
sudden desertions. And in the boy King whom he had raised to 
the throne he met not merely a consummate general, but a politician 
whose subtlety and rapidity of conception was destined to leave a 
deep and enduring mark on the character of the monarchy itself. 
Edward was but nineteen at his accession, and both his kinship (for 
he was the King's cousin by blood) and his recent services rendered 
Warwick during the first three years of his reign all-powerful in 
the state. But the final ruin of Henry's caixse in the battle of Hex- 
ham gave the signal for a silent struggle between Edward and his 
minister. The King's first step was to avow his marriage Avith the 
widow of a slain Lancastrian, Dame Elizabeth Grej^, and to raise 
her family to greatness as a counterpoise to the Nevilles. Her 
father. Lord Rivers, became constable ; her son by the first mar- 
riage was wedded to the heiress of the Duke of Exeter, whom War- 
wick had demanded for his nephew. Warwick's policy lay in a 
close connection with France; he had been already foiled in nego- 
tiating a French marriage for the King, and on his crossing the 
seas to conclude a marriage of the King's sistei', Margaret, with one 
of the French princes, Edward availed himself of his absence to de- 
prive his brother of the seals, and to wed his sister to the sworn 
enemy both of France and of Warwick, Charles the Bold, Duke of 
Burgundy. For the moment it seemed as if the King's ruin were 
at hand. In spite of the royal opposition, Warwick replied to 
Edward's challenge by the marriage of his daughter with the 
King's brother, the Duke of Clarence, and a revolt which instantly 
broke out threw Edwai'd into the hands of his great subject. The 
terms exacted as the price of the King's release transferred to the 
Nevilles the succession to the crown, for Edward was still without 
a son, and Warwick wrested from him the betrothal of his infant 
daughter to the son of Lord Montagu, tlie heir of his house. The 
Earl's ambition, however, was still unsatisfied, and he was advan- 



300 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



cing to suppoi-t a new rising which had broken out at his instiga- 
tion in Lincolnshire, when the rapid march of Edward was followed 
by a decisive victory over the insurgents. It is hopeless, with the 
scanty historical materials we possess of this period, to attempt to 
explain its sudden revolutions of fortune, or the panic which in- 
duced Warwick at this trivial check to fly for refuge to France, 
where the Burgundian connection of Edward secured his enemies 
the support of Louis the Eleventh. But the unscrupulous temper 
of the Earl was seen in the alliance which he at once conclnded 
with the partisans of the House of Lancaster, On the promise of 
Queen Margaret to wed her son to his daughter Anne, Warwick 
engaged to restore the crown to the royal captive Avhora he had 
flung into the Tower; and choosing a moment when Edward was 
busy with a revolt in the North, and when a storm had dispersed 
the Burgundian fleet which defended the Channel, he threw himself 
boldly on the English shore. Kent rose in his support as he dis- 
embarked, and the desertion of Lord Montagu, whom Edward still 
trusted, drove the King, in turn, to seek shelter over-sea. While 
Edward fled with a handful of adherents to the Court of Burgun- 
dy, Henry of Lancaster was again conducted from his prison to the 
throne; but the bitter hate of the party Warwick had so ruthlessly 
crushed found no gratitude for the " king-maker." His own con- 
duct, as well as that of his party, when Edward again disembarked 
in the spring at Ravenspur, showed a weariness of the new alliance, 
quickened, perhaps, by their dread of Margaret, whose return to 
England was hourly expected. Passing through the Lancastrian 
districts of the North with a declai-ation that he waived all right to 
the crown and sought only his own hereditary duchy, Edward was 
left unassailed by an overwhelming force which Montagu had col- 
lected, was joined on his march by his brother Clarence, who had 
throughout acted in concert with Warwick, and was admitted into 
London by Warwick's brother, the Archbishop of Yoi'k. Encamp- 
ed at Coventry, the Earl himself opened negotiations with EdAs^ard 
for a new desertion ; but the King was now strong enough to fling 
off the mask, and Warwick, desperate of a reconciliation, marched 
suddenly on London. The battle of Barnet, a medley of carnage 
and treachery which lasted six hours, ended with the fall of War- 
wick as he fled for hiding to the woods. Margaret had landed too 
late to bring aid to her great partisan ; but the military triumph 
of Edward was completed by the skillful strategy with which he 
forced her array to battle at Tewkesbury, and by its complete over- 
throw. The Queen herself became a captive; her boy fell on the 
field, stabbed — as was affii'med — by the Yorkist lords after Edward 
had met his cry for mercy by a buffet from his gauntlet ; and the 
death of Henry in the Tower crushed the last hopes of the House 
of Lancaster. 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONAEVRY. 



301 



Section III.— The New Monarchy. 1471—1509. 

[Authorities. — To those we have already mentioned, we may add the "Letters 
and Papers of Richard III. and Henry VII.," edited by Mr. Gairdner for the Master 
of the Rolls, as well as Hall's Chronicle, which extends from Henry the Fourth to 
Henry the Eighth. Edward the Fifth is the subject of a work by Sir Thomas More, 
which probably derives much of its information from Archbishop Morton, and is re- 
markable as the first historical work of any literary value which we possess in our 
modern prose. A biography of Henry the Seventh is among the works of Lord Ba- 
con. Miss Hasted, in her "Life of Richard III. ," has elaborately illustrated a reign 
of some constitutional importance. For Caxton, see the admirable biography and 
bibliographical account by Mr. Blades.] 



There are few periods in our aunals from which we turn with 
such weariness and disgust as from the Wars of the Roses. Its 
thick crowd of savage battles, its I'uthless executions, its shameless 
treasons, seem all the more terrible from the pure selfishness of the 
ends for which men fought, the utter want of all nobleness and 
chivalry in the struggle itself, of all great result in its close. But 
even while the contest was raging, the cool eye of a philosophic 
statesman could find in it matter for other feelings than those of 
mere disgust. England presented to Philippe de Commines the 
rare spectacle of a land where, brutal as was the civil strife, " there 
are no buildings destroyed or demolished by war, and where the 
mischief of it falls on those who make the war." The ruin and 
bloodshed were limited, in fact, to the great lords and their feudal 
retainers. Once or twice indeed, as at Towton, the towns threw 
themselves into the struggle on the Yorkist side, but for the most 
part the trading and industrial classes stood wholly apart from and 
unaffected by it. Commerce went on unchecked, and indeed devel- 
oped itself through the closer friendship with Flanders and the House 
of Burgundy more rapidly than at any former period. The general 
tranquillity of the country at large, while feudalism was dashing itself 
to j)ieces in battle after battle, was shown by the remarkable fact that 
justice remained wholly undisturbed. The law courts sat quietly 
at Westminster, the judges rode as of old in circuit, the system of 
jury trial (though the jurors were still expected to use their local 
and personal knowledge of the case) took more and more its mod- 
ern form by the separation of the jurors from the witnesses. But 
if the common view of England during these wars as a mere chaos 
of treason and bloodshed is a false one, still more false is the com- 
mon view of the pettiness of their result. The Wars of the Roses 
did far more than ruin one royal house or set up another on the 
throne. If they did not utterly destroy English freedom, they ar- 
rested its progress for more than a hundred years. They found 
England, in the words of Commines, " among all the world's lord- 
ships of which I have knowledge, that where the public weal is best 
ordered, and where least violence reigns over the people." A king 
of England — the shrewd observer noticed — " can undertake no en- 
terprise of account without assembling his Parliament, which is a 



302 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



thing most wise and holy, and therefore are these kings stronger 
and better served" than the despotic sovereigns of the Continent. 
England, as one of its judges, Sir John Fortescue, could boast to 
Edward the Fourth himself, was not an absolute but a limited mon- 
archy ; not a land where the will of the prince was itself the law, 
but where the prince could neither make laws nor impose taxes save 
by his subjects' consent. At no time had Parliament played so 
constant and prominent a part in the government of the realm. At 
no time had the principles of constitutional liberty seemed so thor- 
oughly understood, and so dear to the people at large. The long 
Parliamentary contest between the Crown and the two Houses since 
the days of Edward the First had firmly established the great se- 
curities of national liberty — the right of freedom from ai'bitrary 
taxation, from arbitrary legislation, from arbitrary imprisonment, 
and the responsibility of even the highest servants of the Crown to 
Parliament and to the law. But with the close of the AVar of the 
Succession freedom suddenly disappears. We enter on an epoch of 
constitutional retrogression in which the slow work of the age that 
went before it is rapidly undone. Parliamentary life is almost sus- 
pended, or is turned into a form by the overpow^ering influence of 
the Crown, The legislative powers of the two Houses are usurp- 
ed by the Royal Council. Arbitrary taxation reappears in benevo- 
lences and forced loans. Personal liberty is almost extinguished 
by a formidable spy system, and by the constant practice of arbitrary 
imprisonment. Justice is degraded by the prodigal use of bills of 
attainder, by the wide extension of the judicial power of the Royal 
Council, by the servility of judges, by the coercion of juries. If 
we seek a reason for so sudden and complete a revolution, we find 
it in the disappearance of feudalism; in other words, of that organ- 
ization of society in which our constitutional liberty had till now 
found its security. Freedom had been won by the sword of the 
baronage. Its tradition had been watched over by the jealousy of 
the Church. The new class of the Commons which had grown 
from the union of the country squire and the town trader was 
widening its sphere of political activity as it grew. But with the 
battle of Towton feudalism vanished away. The baronage lay a 
mere wreck after the storm of the civil war. The Church lingered 
helpless and perplexed, till it was struck down by Thomas Cromwell, 
The traders and the smaller proprietors sank into political inactiv- 
ity. On the other hand, the Crown, which only fifty years before 
had been the sport of every faction, towered into solitary greatness. 
The old English kingship, limited by the forces of feudalism or by 
the progress of constitutional freedom, faded suddenly away, and 
in its place we see, all-absorbing and unrestrained, the despotism of 
the New Monarchy. 

If we use the name of the New Monarchy to express the charac- 
ter of the English sovereignty from the time of Edward the Fourth 
to the time of Elizabeth, it is because the character of the mon- 
archy during this period was something wholly new in our history. 
There is no kind of similarity between the kingship of the Old- 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONABCHY. 



803 



English, of the ISTorman, the Angevin, oi- the Plantagenet sovereigns, 
and the kingship of the Tudovs. The difference between thena 
was the result, not of any gradual developraent, but of a simple rev- 
olution ; and it was only by a revolution that the despotism of the 
New Monarchy was again done away. When the lawyers of the 
Long Parliament fell back for their precedents of constitutional 
liberty to the reign of the House of Lancaster, and silently regard- 
ed the whole period which we are about to traverse as a blank, they 
expressed not merely a legal truth, but an historical one. What the 
Great Rebellion in its iinal result actually did was to wipe away 
every trace of the New Monarchy, and to take up again the thread 
of our political development just where it had been snapped by the 
Wars of the Roses. But revolutionary as the change was, we have 
already seen in their gradual growth the causes which brought 
about the revolution. The social organization from which our po- 
litical constitution had hitherto sprung, and on which it still rested, 
had been silently sapped by the progress of industry, by the growth 
of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment, and by changes in the 
art of war. Its ruin was precipitated by religious persecution, 
by the disfranchisement of the Commons, and by the slaughter 
of the baronage in the civil strife. The great houses were all but 
exterminated, or lingered only in obscure branches which were 
mere shadows of their former greatness. With the exception 
of the Poles, the Stanleys, and the Howards, themselves families 
of recent origin, hardly a fragment of the older baronage remain- 
ed to claim any share in the work of government. Neither the 
Church nor the smaller proprietors of the country, who with the 
merchant classes formed the Commons, were ready to take the 
place of the ruined nobles. Imposing as the great ecclesiastical 
body still seemed from the memories of its past, its immense wealth, 
its tradition of statesmanship, it was rendered powerless by a want 
of spiritual life, by a moral inertness, by its antagonism to the deeper 
religious convictions of the people, and its blind hostility to the in- 
tellectual movement which was beginning to stir the world. Con- 
scious of the want of popular favor, and jealous only for the pres- 
ervation of their vast estates, the churchmen, who had clung for 
protection to the baronage, clung on its fall for protection to the 
Crown. Prelates iike Morton and Wai'hara devoted themselves to 
the Royal Council-board with the simple view of averting by means 
of the monarchy the pillage of the Church. But in any wider 
political sense the influence of the body to which they belonged 
was insignificant. From the time of the Lollard outbreak the atti- 
tude of the Church is timid as that of a hunted thing. It is less 
obvious at first sight why the Commons should share the political 
ruin of the Church and the Lords, for the smaller county proprie- 
tors were growing enormously, both in wealth and numbers, at this 
moment through the fall of the great houses and the dispersion of 
their vast estates, while the burgess class, as we have seen, was de- 
riving fresh riches from the development of trade. But the result 
of the narrowing of the franchise and of the tampering with elec- 



304 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



tions was now felt in the political insignificance of the Lower 
House. Reduced by these measures to a virtual dependence on the 
baronage, it fell with the fall of the class to which it had looked for 
guidance and support. And while its rival forces disappeared, the 
monarchy stood ready to take their place. Not only indeed were 
the churchman, the squire, and the burgess powerless to vindicate 
liberty against the Crown, but the very interests of self-preserva- 
tion led them at this moment to lay freedom at its feet. The 
Church still trembled at the progress of heresy. The close corpo- 
rations of the towns needed protection for their privileges. The 
land-owner shared with the trader a profound horror of the war and 
disorder which they had witnessed, and an almost reckless desire 
to intrust the Crown with any power which would prevent its re- 
turn. But, above all, the landed and moneyed classes clung passion- 
ately to the monarchy, as the one great force left which could save 
them from social revolt. The rising of the Commons of Kent 
shows that the troubles against which the Statutes of Laborers had 
been directed still remained as a formidable source of discontent. 
The great change in the character of agriculture indeed, which we 
have before described, the throwing together of the smaller hold- 
ings, the diminution of tillage, the increase of pasture lands, had 
tended largely to swell the numbers and turbulence of the floating 
labor class. The riots against " inclosures," of which we first hear 
in the time of Henry the Sixth, and which became a constant feat- 
ure of the Tudor period, are indications not only of a constant 
strife going on in every quarter between the land-owner and the 
smaller peasant class, but of a mass of social discontent which was 
constantly seeking an outlet in violence and revolution. And at 
this moment the break-up of the military households of the nobles 
by the attainders and confiscations of the Wars of the Koses, as 
well as by the Statute of Liveries which followed them, added a 
new element of violence and disorder to the seething mass. It is 
this social danger which lies at the root of the Tudor despotism. 
For the proprietary classes the repression of the poor was a ques- 
tion of life and death. The land-owner and the merchant were 
ready, as they have been ready in all ages of the world, to surrender 
freedom into the hands of the one power which could preserve them 
from what they deemed to be anarchy. It was to the selfish panic 
of the wealthier land-owners that England owed the Statutes of 
Laborers, with their terrible heritage of a pauper class. It was to 
the selfish panic of both the land-owner and the merchant that she 
owed the despotism of the New Monarchy. 

The founder of the New Monarchy was Edward the Fourth. As 
a mere boy he showed himself the ablest and the most pitiless 
among the warriors of the civil Avar. In the first flush of manhood 
he looked on with a cool ruthlessness while gray-haired nobles were 
hurried to the block, or while his Lancastrian child-rival was stab- 
bed at his feet. In his later race for power he had shown himself 
more subtle in his treachery than even Warwick himself. His 
triumph was no sooner won, however, than the young King seemed 



TEE NEW MONAECRY. 



305 



ibaudon :luraself to a voluptuous indolence, to revels with the 

i-wives of London and the caresses of his mistress, Jane Shore. 

statttre and of singular beauty, his Avinning manners and 

carelessness of bearing secured him a popularity Avhich had 

denied to nobler kings. But his indolence and gayety were 

veils- beneath which Edward shrouded a profound political 

ility. No one could contrast more utterly in outer appearance 
V iih the subtle sovereigns of his time, with Louis the Eleventh 'or 
lerdinand of Arragon, but his work was the same as theirs, and it 

•> done even more completely. While jesting with aldermen, 

■Rallying with his mistresses, or idling over the new pages from 
printing-press at "Westminster, Edward was silently laying the 

nidations of an absolute rule which Henry the Seventh did little 
more than develop and consolidate. The almost total discontinu- 
ance of Parliamentary life was in itself a revolution. Up to this 
nio-nent the two Houses had played a part which became more and 
more prominent in the government of the realm. Under the two 
flr.^t kings of the House of Lancaster they had been summoned al- 
most every year. Not only had the right of self-taxation and initia- 
tion of laws'been yielded explicitly to the Commons, but they had 
i-^k'in bart in the work of government itself, had dii-ected the appli- 

ion\)f subsidies, and called the royal ministers to account by 
i arlianJentary impeachments. Under Henry the Sixth an impor- 
tant step in constitutional progress had been made by abandoning 
the old form of presenting the requests of the Parliament in the form 
of petitions which were subsequently moulded into statutes by the 
Royal Council ; the statute itself, in its final form, was now present- 
ed for the royal assent, and the Crown was deprived of its former 
privilege of modifying it. Not only does this progress cease, but 
the legislative activity of Parliament itself comes abruptly to an end. 
The reign of Edwai'd the Fourth is the first since that of John in 
which not _a^gingle law which promoted freedom or remedied the 
abuses of power was even proposed to Parliament. The necessity 
for summoning the two Houses had, in fact, been removed by the 
enormous tide of wealth which the confiscation of the civil war 
poured into the royal treasury. In the single bill of attainder 
\vhich followed the victory of Towton, twelve great nobles and 
more than a hundred knights and squires were stripped of their 
estates to the King's profit. It was said that nearly a fifth of the 
land had passed into the royal possession at one period or another 
of the civil war. Edward added to his resources by trading on a 
vast scale. The royal ships, freighted with tin, wool, and cloth, 
made the name of the merchant-king famous in the ports of Italy 
and Greece, The enterprises he had planned against France, though 
frustrated by the refusal of Charles of Burgundy to co-operate with 
him in them, afforded a fresh financial resource ; and the subsidies 
granted for a war which never took place swelled the royal ex- 
chequer. But the pretext of war enabled Edward not only to in- 
crease his hoard, but to deal a deadly blow at libertj^ Setting aside 
tlie usage of loans sanctioned by the authority of Parliament, Ed- 

20 



306 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[C: 



^ 



Seo. III. 
Thk New 

MoNAKOHY. 

1471- 
1509. 

12T4. 



I-itera- 
tiire after 
Chaucer. 



ward called before him the merchants of the city and requested 
from each a present or " benevolence" in proportion to the need', 
Their compliance with his prayer was probably aided by his popu 
larity with the merchant class, but the system of " benevolence" wa; 
soon to be developed into the forced loans of Wolsey and the ship[ 
money of Charles the First. It was to Edward that his Tudof 
successors owed their elaborate spy system, the introduction of th^ 
rack into the Towei", and the practice of royal interference with the 
purity of justice. In the history of intellectual progress alone his 
reign takes a brighter color, and the founder of the New Monarchy 
presents his one solitary claim to our regard as the j)atron of Cax- 
ton. 

Literature indeed seemed at this moment to have died as utte.'ly 
as freedom itself. The genius of Chaucer, and of the one or mjre 
poets whose works have been confounded with Chaucer's, defied for 
a while the pedantry, the affectation, the barrenness of tlieir aje ; 
but the sudden close of this poetic outburst left England to a crowd 
of poetasters, compilers, scribblers of interminable moralities, rLym- 
ers of chronicles, and translators from the worn-out field of Fjench 
romance. Some faint trace of the liveliness and beauty of older mod- 
els lingers among the heavy platitudes of Gower; but even this van- 
ished from the didactic puerilities, the prosaic commonplace^., of Oc- 
cleve and Lydgate. The literature of the Middle Ages was dying 
out with the Middle Ages themselves ; in letters as in life their thirst 
for knowledge had spent itself in the barren mazes of the scho'lastic 
philosophy, their ideal of w^arlike nobleness faded away bufore the 
gaudy travesty of a spurious chivalry, and the mystic cr:thusiasni 
of their devotion shrunk at the touch of persecution into a nar- 
row orthodoxy and a flat morality. The clergy, Avho liad concen- 
trated in themselves the intellectual effort of the older time, were 
ceasing to be an intellectual class at all. Their monasteries were no 
longer seats of learning. " I found in them," said Poggio, an Ital- 
ian traveler twenty years after Chaucer's death, " men given up to 
sensuality in abundance, but very few lovers of learning, and those 
of a barbarous sort, skilled more in quibbles and sophisms than in 
literature." The erection of colleges, which was beginning, could 
not arrest the quick decline of the universities both in numbers and 
learning. The students at Oxford amounted to but a fifth of those 
who had attended its lectures a century before, and "Oxford Lat- 
in" became proverbial for a jargon in which the very tradition of 
grammar had been lost. All literary production was nearly at an 
end ; there is not a single work, for instance, either in Latin or En- 
glish which we can refer to the ten years of the reign of Edward 
the Fourth. Historical composition lingered on indeed in compila- 
tions of extracts from past writers, such as make up the so-called 
works of Walsiogham, in jejune monastic annals like those of St. 
Albans, or worthless popular compendiuras like those of Fabyan 
and Harding. But the only real trace of mental activity is to be 
found in the numerous treatises on alchemy and magic, on the elixir 
of life or the philosopher's stone, the fungous growth which most 



VI.] 



THE NEW MOXARCRY. 



o /-. K 



unequivocally witnesses to the progress of intellectnal decay. On 
the other hand, while the pui-ely literary class was thus dying out, 
a glance beneath the surface shows us the stir of a new interest in 
knowledge among the masses of the people itself. Books are far 
from being the only indication of a people's progress in knowledge, 
and the correspondence of the Paston family, which has been happi- 
ly preserved, displays a fluency and vivacity, as well as a grammat- 
ical correctness, which would have been impossible in familiar letters 
a hundred years before. The very character of the authorship of 
the time, its love of compendiums and abridgments of the scientific 
and historical knowledge of its day, its dramatic performances or 
mysteries, the commonplace morality of its poets, the popularity of 
its rhymed chronicles, are additional proofs that literature was ceas- 
ing to be the possession of a purely intellectual class and Avas now 
beginning to appeal to the people at large. The increased use of 
linen paper in place of the costlier parchment helped in the popular- 
ization of letters. In no former age had finer copies of books been 
produced ; in none had so many been transcribed. Abroad this in- 
creased demand for their production caused the processes of copy- 
ing and illuminating manuscripts to be transferred from the scrip- 
toria of the religious houses into the hands of trade-guilds, like the 
Guild of St. John at Bruges, or the Brothers of the Pen at Brussels. 
It was, in fact, this increase of demand for books, pamphlets, or fly- 
sheets, especially of a grammatical or religious character, in the 
middle of the fifteenth century that brought about the introduction 
of printing. We meet with it first in rude sheets simply struck off 
from wooden blocks, " block-books" as they are now called, and later 
on in works printed from separate and movable types. Originating 
at Maintz with the three famous printers, Gutenberg, Faust, and 
Schceffer, the new process traveled southward to Strasburg, cross- 
ed the Alps to Venice, where it lent itself through the Aldi to the 
spread of Greek literature in Europe, and then floated down the 
Rhine to Cologne and the towns of Flanders. It was probably at 
the press of Colard Mansion, in a little room over the porch of St. 
Donat's at Bruges, that Caxton learned the art which he was the 
first to introduce into England. 

A Kentish boy by birth, but apprenticed to a London mercer, 
William Caxton had already spent thirty years of his manhood in 
Flanders, as Governor of the English guild of Merchant Advent- 
urers there, when we find him engaged as copyist in the service 
of the Duchess of Burgundy. But the tedious process of copying 
was soon thrown aside for the new art which Colard Mansion had 
introduced into Bruges. "Forasmuch as in the writing of the 
same," Caxton tells us in the preface to his first printed work, the 
" Tales of Troy," " my pen is worn, my hand weary and not stead- 
fast, mine eyes dimmed with overmuch looking on the white paper, 
and my courage not so prone and ready to labor as it hath been, 
and that age creepeth on me daily and feebleth all the body, and 
also because I have promised to divers gentlemen and to my friends 
to address to them as hastily as I might the said book, therefore I 



308 



HIS TOUT OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[ClIAP. 



have practiced and learned at ray great charge and dispense to or- 
dain this said book in print after the manner and form as ye may 
see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the 
end that every man may have them at once, for all the books of this 
story here emprynted as ye see were begun in one day and also fin- 
ished in one day." The printing-press was the precious freight he 
bi-ought back to England, after an absence of five-and-thirty years. 
Through the next fifteen, at an age when other men look for ease 
and retirement, we see him plunging with characteristic energy into 
his new occupation. His "red pole" invited buyers to the press 
established in the Ahiionry at Westminster, a little inclosure con- 
taining a chapel and almshouses (swept away since Caxton's time 
by later buildings) near the west front of the church, where the 
alms of the abbey were distributed to tlie poor. " If it please any 
man, spiritual or temporal," runs his advertisement, " to buy any 
pyes of two or three commemorations of Salisbury all emprynted 
after the form of the present letter, which be well and truly correct, 
let him come to Westminster into the Ahnonry at the red pole, and 
he shall have them good chepe." He was a practical man of busi- 
ness, as this advertisement shows, no rival of the Venetian Aldi or 
of the classical printers of Rome, but resolved to get a living from 
his trade, supplying priests witli service books, and preachers with 
sermons, furnishing the clerk with his " Golden Legend," and knight 
and baron Avith "joyous and pleasant histories of chivalry." But 
while careful to win his daily bread, he found time to do much for 
what of higher literature lay fairly to hand. He printed all the 
English poetry of any moment which was then in existence. His 
reverence for " that worshipful man, Geoff ry Chaucer," who " ought 
eternally to be remembered," is shown not merely by his edition of 
the " Canterbury Tales," but by his reprint of them when a purer 
text of the poem offered itself. The poems of Lydgate and Gower 
were soon added to those of Chaucer. The " Chronicle of Brut" 
and Higden's " Polychronicon" were the only available works of an 
historical character then existing in the English tongue, and Caxton 
not only printed them, but himself continued the latter up to his 
own time. A translation of Boethius, a version of the "^neid" 
from the French, and a tract or two of Cicero, were the stray first- 
fruits of the classical press in England. 

Busy as was Caxton's printing-press, he was even busier as a 
translator than as a printer. More than four thousand of his print- 
ed pages are from works of his own rendering. The need of these 
translations shows the popular drift of literature at the time ; but 
keen as the demand seems to liave been, there is nothing mechanic- 
al in the temper with which Caxton prepared to meet it. A natu- 
ral, simple-hearted literary taste and enthusiasm, especially for the 
style and forms of language, breaks out in his curious prefaces. 
" Having no work in hand," he says in the preface to his "JEneid," 
"I sitting in my study where as lay many divers pamphlets and 
books, happened that to my hand came a little book in French, 
which late was translated out of Latin by some noble clerk of 



VI,] 



THE NEW MONABCRY. 



309 



France- — which book is named 'Eneydos,' and made in Latin by 
that noble poet and great clerk Vergyl — in which book I had 
o;reat pleasure by reason of the fair and honest termes and wordes 
in French whicli I never saw to-fore-like, none so pleasant nor so 
well ordered, which book as me seemed should be much requisite 
for noble men to see, as well for the eloquence as the histories ; 
and when I had advised me to this said book I deliberated and 
concluded to translate it into English, and forthwith took a pen 
and ink and wrote a leaf or twain." But the work of transla- 
tion involved a choice of English which made Caxton's work im- 
portant in the history of our language. He stood between two 
schools of translation, that of French affectation and English ped- 
antry. It was a moment Avhen the character of our literary tongue 
was being settled, and it is curious to see in his own words the 
struggle over it which was going on in Caxton's time. " Some 
honest and great clerks have been with me and desired me to write 
the most curious terms that I could find ;" on the other hand, " some 
gentlemen of late blamed me, saying that in my translations I had 
over many curious terms which could not be understood of common 
people, and desired me to use old and homely terms in my transla- 
tions." " Fain would I please every man," comments the good-hu- 
mored printer, but his sturdy sense saved him alike from the tempta- 
tions of the Court and the schools. His own taste pointed to En- 
glish, but "to the common terms that he daily used" rather than to 
the English of his antiquarian advisers. "I took an old book and 
read therein, and certainly the English was so rude and broad I 
could not well understand it," while the Old-English charters which 
the Abbot of Westminster fetched as models from the archives of 
his house seemed " more like to Dutch than to English." On the 
other hand, to adopt current phraseology was by no means easy at 
a time when even the speech of common talk was in a state of rapid 
flux. " Our language now used varieth far from that which was 
used and spoken when I was born." Not only so, but the tongue 
of each shire was still peculiar to itself, and hardly intelligible to 
men of another county. " Common English that is spoken in one 
shire varieth from another so much, that in my days happened that 
certain merchants were in a ship in Thames, for to have sailed over 
the sea into Zealand, and for lack of wind they tarried at Foreland, 
and went on land for to refresh them. And one of them, named 
Sheffield, a mercer, came into a house and asked for meat, and es- 
pecially he asked them after eggs. And the good wife answered 
that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for 
he also could speak no French, but would have had eggs, but she 
understood him not. And then at last another said he would have 
eyren, then the good wife said she understood him well. Lo ! what 
should a man in these days now write," adds the puzzled printer, 
" eggs or eyren ? Certainly it is hard to please every man by cause 
of diversity and change of language." His own mother-tongue, too, 
was that of "Kent in the Weald, where I doubt not is sj)oken as 
broad and rude English as in any place of England j" and coupling 



310 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



this with his long absence in Flanders, we can hardly wonder at the 
confession he makes over his first translation, that " when all these 
things came to fore me, after that I had made and written a five or 
six quires, I fell in despair of this work, and purposed never to have 
continued therein, and the quires laid apart, and in two years after 
labored no more in this work." 

He was still, however, busy translating when he died. All diffi- 
culties, in fact, were lightened by the general interest which his la- 
bors aroused. When the length of the " Golden Legend" makes 
him " half desperate to have accomplisht it" and ready to " lay it 
apart," the Earl of Arundel solicits him in nowise to leave it, and 
promises a yearly fee of a buck in summer and a doe in winter, once 
it were done. " Many noble and divers gentle men of this realm 
came and demanded many and often times wherefore I have not 
aiade and emprynted the noble history of the ' San Graal.' " We 
see his visitors discussing with the sagacious printer the historic 
existence of Arthur. Duchess Margaret of Somerset lends him her 
" Blauchadine and Eglantine ;" the Archdeacon of Colchester brings 
him his translation of the work called " Cato ;" a mercer of London 
presses him to undertake the " Royal Book" of Philip le Bel. The 
Queen's brother. Earl Rivers, chats with him over his own transla- 
tion of the " Sayings of the Philosophers." Even kings showed 
their interest in his work : his " Tully" was printed under the pat- 
ronage of Edward the Fourth, his " Order of Chivalry" dedicated 
to Richard the Third, his " Facts of Arms" published at the desire 
of Henry the Seventh. The royal houses of York and Lancaster, 
in fact, rivaled each other in their patronage of such literature as 
they could find. The fashion of large and gorgeous libraries had 
passed from the French to the English princes of the time : Henry 
the Sixth had a valuable collection of books ; that of the Louvre was 
seized by Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, and formed the basis of 
the fine library which he presented to the University of Oxford. 
The great nobles took a far more active and personal part in the 
literary revival. The warrior, Sir John Fastolf, was a Avell-known 
lover of books. Earl Rivers was himself one of the authors of the 
day; he found leisure in the intervals of pilgrimages and politics 
to translate the " Sayings of the Philosophers" and a couple of re- 
ligious tracts for Caxton's press. A friend of far greater intellect- 
ual distinction, however, than these was found in John Tiptof t. Earl 
of Worcester. He had wandered during the reign of Henry the 
Sixth, in search of learning to Italy, had studied at her universities, 
and become a teacher at Padua, Avhere the elegance of his Latinity 
drew tears from one of the most learned of the popes, Pius the Sec- 
ond, better known as ^neas Sylvius. Caxton can find no Avords 
warm enough to express his admiration of one " which in his time 
flowered in virtue and cunning, to whom I know none like among 
the lords of the temporality in science and moral virtue." But the 
ruthlessness of the Renascence appeared in Tiptoft side by side 
with its intellectual vigor, and the fall of one whose cruelty had 
earned him the surname of " the Butcher" even amid the horrors 



vi.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



311 



of the civil war was greeted with sorrow by none bnt the faithful 
printer. " What great loss was it," he says in a preface long after 
his fall, " of that noble, virtuous, and well-disposed lord ; when I re- 
member and advertise his life, his science, and his virtue, me think- 
eth (God not displeased) over great a loss of such a man, considei-- 
ing his estate and cunning." 

Among the group who encouraged the press of Caxton we have 
already seen the figure of the King's young brother, Richard, Duke 
of Gloucester. Able and ruthless as Edward himself, the Duke had 
watched keenly the increase of public discontent as his brother's 
policy developed itself, and had founded on it a scheme of daring 
ambition. On the King's death, Richard hastened to secure the 
person of his royal nephew, Edward the Fifth, to hurry the Queen's 
family to execution, and to receive from the hands of Parliament 
the office of Protector of the realm. As yet he had acted in strict 
union with the Royal Council, but hardly a month had passed, when, 
suddenly entering the Council-chamber, he charged Lord Hastings, 
the favorite minister of the late King, who still presided over its 
meetings, with sorcery and designs upon his life. As he dashed 
his hand upon the table the room Avas filled with soldiers. " I will 
not dine," said the Duke, addressing Hastings, "till they _ have 
brought me your head ;" and the powerful minister was hurried to 
instant execution in the court-yard of the Tower. His colleagues 
were thrown into prison, and every check on the Duke's designs 
was removed. Edward's marriage had always been unpopular, 
and Richard ventured, on the plea of a pre-contract on his broth- 
er's part, to declare it invalid and its issue illegitimate. Only one 
step remained to be taken, and a month after his brother's death 
the Duke Ustened with a show of reluctance to the prayer of the 
Parliament, and consented to accept the crown. Daring, however, 
as was his natural temper, it was not to mere violence that he trust- 
ed in this seizure of the throne. The personal popularity of Ed- 
ward had hardly restrained the indignation with which the nation 
felt the gradual approach of tyranny throughout his reign ; and it 
was as the restorer of its older liberties that Richard appealed for 
popular support. " We be determined," said the citizens of Lon- 
don in a petition to the new monarch, " rather to adventure and to 
commit us to the peril of our lives and jeopardy of death, than to 
live in such thralldom and bondage as we have lived long time 
heretofore, oppressed and injured by extortions and new imposi- 
tions against the laws of God and man and the liberty and laws of 
this realm, wherein every Englishman is inherited." The new King 
met the appeal by again convoking Parliament, which, as we have 
seen, had been all but discontinued under Edward, and by sweep- 
ing measures of reform. In the one session of his brief reign he 
declared the practice of extorting money by " benevolences" illegal, 
while numerous grants of pardons and remission of forfeitures re- 
versed in some measure the policy of terror by which Edward at 
once held the country in awe and filled his treasury. The energy 
of the new c;ovei'nraent Avas seen in the numerous statutes Avhich 



312 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sbo. IIL 

The Nkw 
Monarchy. 

1471- 
1509. 



broke the slumbers of Parliamentary legislation. A series of mer- 
cantile enactments strove to protect the growing interests of En- 
glish comniei'ce. The King's interest in literature showed itself in 
the provision that no statutes should act as a hinderance "to any 
artificer or merchant stranger, of what nation or country he be, for 
bringing unto this realm or selling by retail or otherwise of any 
manner of books, written or imprinted." His prohibition of the 
iniquitous seizure of goods before conviction of felony, which had 
prevailed during Edward's reign, his liberation of the bondmen 
who still remained unenfranchised on the royal domain, and his 
religious foundations, show Richard's keen anxiety to purchase a 
popularity in which the bloody opening of his reign might be for- 
gotten. But the gratitude which he had earned by his restoration 
of the older liberty was swept away in the universal horror at a 
new deed of blood. His young nephews, Edward the Fifth and his 
brother, the Duke of York, had been flung, at his accession, into the 
Tower ; and the sudden disappearance of the two boys, murdered, 
as it was alleged, by their uncle's order, united the whole nation 
against him. Morton, the exiled Bishop of Ely, took advantage of 
the general hatred and of the common hostility of both Yorkists 
and Lancastrians to the royal murderer to link both parties in a 
wide conspiracy. Of the line of John of Gaunt no lawful issue re- 
mained, but the House of Somerset had sprung, as we have seen, 
from his union with his mistress, Catherine Swynford ; and the last 
representative of this line, the Lady Margaret Beaufort, had 'mar- 
ried Edmund Tudor, and become the mother of Henry, Earl of 
Richmond. In the bill which in other respects legitimated the 
Beauforts the right of succession to the throne had been expressly 
reserved, but as the last remaining cion of the line of Lancaster, 
Hem-y's claim to it was acknowledged by the partisans of his house, 
and he had been driven to seek a refuge in Brittany from the jeal- 
ous hostility of the Yorkist sovereigns. Morton, who had joined 
him in his exile, induced him to take advantage of the horror with 
which Richard was regarded even by the Yorkists themselves, and 
to unite both parties in his favor by a promise of marriage with 
Margaret, the eldest daughter of Edward the Fourth. The result 
of this masterly policy was seen as soon as the Earl landed, in spite 
of Richard's vigilance, at Milford Haven, and advanced through 
Wales. He no sooner encountered the royal army at Bosworth 
Field in Leicestershire than treachery decided the day. Abandon- 
ed ere the battle began by a division of his forces under Lord Stan- 
ley, and as it opened by a second body under the Earl of Northum- 
berland, Richard dashed, with a cry of " Treason ! Treason !" into 
the thick of the fight. In the fury of his despair he had already 
flung the Lancastrian standard to the ground and hewed his way 
into the very presence of his rival, when he fell, ovei-powered by 
numbers ; and the crown Avhich he had worn, and which was found, 
as the struggle ended, lying near a hawthorn-bush, Avas placed on 
the head of the conqueror. 

"With the accession of Henry the Seventh ended the long blood- 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



313 



shed of the civil wars. The two waning lines were united by his 
marriage with Elizabeth : his only dangerous rivals were removed 
by the successive executions of the nephews of Edward the Fourth, 
the Earl of Warwick (a son of Edward's brother, the Duke of Clar- 
ence) and John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln (a son of Edward's sis- 
ter), who had been acknowledged as his successor by Richard the 
Third. Two remarkable imiDOStors succeeded for a time in excit- 
ing formidable revolts — Lambert Simnel, the son of a joiner at Ox- 
ford, under the name of the Earl of Warwick, and Perkin War- 
beck, a native of Tournay, who personated the Duke of York, the 
second of the children murdered in the Tower. Defeat, however, 
reduced the first to the post of scullion in the royal kitchen ; and 
the second, after far stranger adventures, and the recognition of 
his claims by the Kings of Scotland and France, as well as by the 
Duchess- Dowager of Burgundy, whom he claimed as his aunt, 
was captured and brought to the block. Revolt only proved more 
clearly the strength which had been given to the New Monarchy 
by the revolution which had taken place in the art of war. The 
introduction of gunpowder had ruined feudalism. The mounted 
and heavily armed knight gave way to the meaner footman. For- 
tresses which had been impregnable against the attacks of the Mid- 
dle Ages crumbled before the new artillery. Although gunpowder 
had been in use as early as Cressy, it was not till the accession of 
the House of Lancaster that it Avas really brought into effective 
employment as a military resource. But the revolution in warfare 
was immediate. The wars of Henry the Fifth were wars of sieges. 
The "Last of the Barons," as Warwick has picturesquely been 
styled, relied mainly on his train of artillery. Artillery gave Hen- 
ry the Seventh his easy victory over a rising of the Cornish insur- 
gents, the most formidable danger which threatened his throne. 
The strength which the change gave to the Crown was, in fact, 
almost irresistible. Throughout the Middle Ages the call of a 
great baron had been enough to raise a formidable revolt. Yeo- 
men and retainers took down the bow from their chimney-corner, 
knights buckled on their armor, and in a few days an army threat- 
ened the throne. But without artillery such an array was now help- 
less, and the one train of artillery in the kingdom lay at the dispos- 
al of the King. It was the consciousness of his strength which ena- 
bled the new sovereign to quietly I'esume the policy of Edward the 
Fourth. He was forced, indeed, by the circumstances of his de- 
scent to base his right to the throne on a purely Parliamentary ti- 
tle. Without reference either to the claim of blood or conquest, 
the Houses enacted simply "that the inheritance of the Crown 
should be, rest, remain, and abide in the most royal person of their 
sovereign lord. King Henry the Seventh, and the heirs of his body 
lawfully ensuing." But the policy of Edward was faithfully fol- 
lowed, and Parliament was only once convened during the last thir- 
teen years of Henry's reign. The chief aim, indeed, of the King 
appeared to be the accumulation of a treasure which should relieve 
him from the need of appealing for its aid. Subsidies granted for 



314 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the support of a wai' with France, which Henry evaded, Avere care- 
fully hoarded by his grasping economy, and swelled by the revival 
of dormant claims of the Crown, by the exaction of fines for the 
breach of forgotten tenures, and by a host of petty extortions. 
The discontinuance of Parliament was followed by the revival of 
benevolences. A dilemma of his favorite minister, which received 
the name of " Morton's fork," extorted gifts to the exchequer from 
men who lived handsomely on the ground that their wealth was 
manifest, and from those who lived plainly on the plea that econo- 
my had made them wealthy. So successful were these efforts, that 
at the end of his reign Henry bequeathed a hoard of two millions 
to his successor. The same imitation of Edward's policy was seen 
in Henry's civil government. Broken as was the strength of the 
baronage, there still remained lords whom the new monarch watch- 
ed with a jealous solicitude. Their jDower lay in the hosts of dis- 
orderly retainers who swarmed round their houses, ready to fur- 
nish a force in case of revolt, while in peace they became centres of 
outrage and defiance to the law. Edward had ordered the dissolu- 
tion of these military households in his Statute of Liveries, and the 
statute was enforced by Henry witli the utmost severity. On a 
visit to the Earl of Oxford, one of the most devoted adherents of 
the Lancastrian cause, the King found two long lines of liveried 
retainers drawn up to receive him. "I thank you for your good 
cheer, my lord," said Henry as they parted, " but I may not en- 
dure to have my laws broken in my sight. My attorney must speak 
with you." The Earl was glad to escape with a fine of £10,000. 
It was with a special view to the suppression of this danger that 
Henry revived the criminal jurisdiction of the Royal Council, which 
had almost fallen into desuetude, and whose immense development 
at a later time furnished his son with his readiest instrument of 
tyranny. A yet more dangerous innovation, the law which enabled 
justices of assize or of the peace to try all cases save those of trea- 
son and felony without a jury, may have been a merely temporary 
measure for the redress of disordei', and was repealed at the open- 
ing of tlie next reign. But steady as was the drift of Henry's pol- 
icy in the direction of despotism, Ave see no traces of the originality 
or genius Avith Avhich the fancy of later historians has invested him. 
His temper, silent, jealous, but essentially commonplace, was content 
to follow out, tamely and patiently, the plans of Edward, without 
anticipating the more terrible policy of Wolsey or of Cromwell. 
Wrapped in schemes of foreign intrigue, to Avhich we shall after- 
Avard refer, he looked with dread and suspicion on the one move- 
ment Avhich broke the apathy of his reign, the great intellectual rcA'- 
olution Avhich bears the name of the Revival of Letters. 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONABCRY. 



315 



Section IV.— TJie New Learning. 1509—1520. 

[A?uthorities. — The general literary history of this period is fully and accurately 
given by Mr. liallam ("Literature of Europe"), and in a confused but interesting 
way by Warton ("History of English Poetry"). The best and most accessible 
edition in England of the typical book of the RcYival, More's "Utopia," is that 
published and edited by Mr. Arber ("English Reprints," 1869). The history of 
Erasmus in England may be followed in his own entertaining Letters, abstracts of 
some of which will be found in the well-known biography by Jortin. Colet's work 
and the theological aspect of the Revival have been admirably described by Mr. See- 
bohm ("The Oxford Reformers of 1498") ; for Warham's share, I have ventured to 
borrow a little from a paper of mine on " Lambeth and the Archbishops," in Mac- 
millan's Magazme,'\ 

While England cowered before the horroi's of civil w.ir, or slum- 
bered beneath the apathetic rule of Henry the Seventh, the world 
around her was passing through changes more momentous than any 
it had witnessed since the victory of Christianity and the fall of 
the Roman Empire. Its physical bounds were suddenly enlarged. 
The discoveries of Copernicus revealed to man the secret of the 
universe. The daring of the Portuguese mariners doubled the 
Cape of Good Hope and anchored their merchant fleets in the har- 
bors of India. Columbus crossed the untraversed ocean to add a 
New World to the Old. Sebastian Cabot, starting from the port 
of Bristol, threaded his way among the icebergs of Labrador. This 
sudden contact with new lands, new faiths, new races of men, quick- 
ened the slumbering intelligence of Europe into a strange curiosity. 
The first book of voyages that told of the Western World, the 
travels of Amerigo Vespucci, was, at the time of More's "UtoiDia," 
" in every body's hands." The " Utopia" itself, in its wide range of 
speculation on every subject of human thought and action, tells us 
how roughly and utterly the narrowness and limitation of the Mid- 
dle Ages had been broken up. The capture of Constantinople by 
the Turks, and the flight of its Greek scholars to the shores of 
Italy, opened anew the science and literature of the older world at 
the very hour when the intellectual energy of the Middle Ages had 
sunk into exhaustion. Not a single book of any real value, save 
those of Sir John Fortescue and Philippe de Commines, was pro- 
duced north of the Alps during the fifteenth century. In England, 
as we have seen, literature had reached its lowest ebb. It was at 
this moment that the exiled Greek scholars were welcomed in Italy; 
and that Florence, so long the home of freedom and of art, became 
the home of an intellectual revival. The poetry of Homer, the 
drama of Sophocles, the philosophy of Aristotle and of Plato, Avoke 
again to life beneath the shadow of the mighty dome Math which 
Brunelleschi had just crowned the city by the Arno. All the rest- 
less energy which Florence had so long thrown into the cause of 
liberty she flung, now that her liberty was reft from her, into the 
cause of letters. The galleys of her merchants brought back manu- 
scripts from the East as the most precious portion of their freight. 
In the palaces of her nobles fragments of classic sculpture ranged 



,316 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



themselves beneath the frescoes of Ghirlandajo. The recovery of 
a treatise of Cicero or a tract of SaUust from the dust of a mo- 
nastic library was welcomed by the group of statesmen and artists 
who gathered in the Rucellai gardens with a thrill of enthusiasm. 
Crowds of foreign scholars soon flocked over the Alps to learn 
Greek, the key of the new knowledge, from the Florentine teachers. 
Grocyn, a fellow of New College, was perhaps the first Englishman 
who studied under the Greek exile, Chalcondylas, and the Greek 
lectures which he delivered in Oxford on his return mark the open- 
ing of a new period in our history. Physical as well as literary 
activity awoke with the rediscovery of the teachers of Greece, and 
the continuous progress of English science may be dated from the 
day when Linacre, another Oxford student, returned from the lec- 
tures of the Florentine Politian to revive the older tradition of 
medicine by his translation of Galen. The awakening of a rational 
Christianity, whether in England or in the Teutonic work! at large, 
begins with the Florentine studies of John Colet. 

From the first it was manifest that the revival of letters Avould 
take a tone in England very different from the tone it had taken in 
Italy — a tone less literary, less largely human, but more moral, more 
religious, more practical in its bearings both upon society and poli- 
tics. The vigor and earnestness of Colet were the best proof of 
the strength with which the new movement was to affect English 
religion. He came back from Florence to Oxford utterly unto,uch- 
ed by the Platonic mysticism or the semi-serious infidelity Avhich 
characterized the group of scholars round Lorenzo the Magnificent. 
He was hardly more influenced by their literary enthusiasm. The 
knowledge of Greek seems to have had one almost exclusive end 
for him, and this was a religious end. Greek was the key by Avhich 
he could unlock the Gospels and the IsTew Testament, and in these 
he thought that he could find a new religious standing-ground. It 
was this i-esolve of Colet to fling aside the traditional dogmas of his 
day, and to discover a rational and practical religion in the Gospels 
themselves, which gave its peculiar stamp to the theology of the 
Renascence. His faith stood simply on a vivid realization of the 
person of Christ. In the prominence which such a view gave to 
the moral life, in his free criticism of the earlier Scriptures, in his 
tendency to simple forms of doctrine and confessions of faith, Colet 
struck the key-note of a mode of religious thought as strongly in 
contrast with that of the later Reformation as with that of Cathol- 
icism itself. The allegorical and mystical theology on which the 
Middle Ages had spent their intellectual vigor to such little purpose 
fell at one blow before his rejection of all but the historical and 
grammatical sense of the Biblical text. The great fabric of belief 
built lip by the mediaeval doctors seemed to him simply " the cor- 
ruptions of the school-men." In the life and sayings of its founder, 
he found a simple and rational Christianity, whose fittest expression 
was the Apostles' Creed. "About the rest," he said with charac- 
teristic impatience, " let divines dispute as they will." Of his at- 
titude toward the coarser aspects of the current religion his behav- 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCRT. 



317 



ior at a later time before the famous shrine of St. Thomas at Can- 
terbmy gives us a rough indication. As the blaze of its jewels, its 
costly sculptures, its elaborate metal-work burst on Colet's view, he 
suggested with bitter irony that a saint so lavish to the poor in his 
lifetime would certainly prefer that they should possess the wealth 
heaped round him since his death, and rejected with jDetulant dis- 
gust the rags of the martyr which were offered for his adoration, 
and the shoe which was offered for his kiss. The earnestness, the 
religious zeal, the very impatience and want of sympathy with the 
past which we see in every word and act of the man, burst out in 
the lectures on St. Paul's epistles which he delivered at Oxford. 
Even to the most critical among his hearers he seemed "like one 
inspired, raised in voice, eye, his whole countenance and mien, out 
of himself." Severe as was the outer life of the new teacher, a 
severity marked by his plain black robe and the frugal table which 
he preserved amid his later dignities, his lively conversation, his 
frank simplicity, the purity and nobleness of his life, even tlie keen 
outbursts pf his troublesome temper, endeared him to a group of 
scholars among whom Erasmus and Thomas More stood in the 
foremost rank. 

''' Greece has crossed the Alps," cried the exiled Argyropulos on 
hearing a translation of Thucydides by tlie German Reuchlin ; but 
the glory, whether of Reuchlin or of the Teutonic scholars who fol- 
lowed him, was soon eclipsed by that of Erasmus. His enormous 
industry, the vast store of classical learning which he gradually ac- 
cumulated, Erasmus shared with others of his day. In patristic 
reading he may have stood beneath Luther; in originality and pro- 
foundness of thought he was certainly inferior to More. His theol- 
ogy, though he made a far greater mark on the world by it than 
even by his scholar-ship, \\q have seen that he derived almost with- 
out change from Colet. But his combination of vast learning with 
keen observation, of acuteness of remark with a lively fancy, of ge- 
nial wit with a perfect good sense — his union of as sincere a piety 
and as profound a zeal for rational religion as Colet's with a dispas- 
sionate fairness toward older faiths, a large love of secular culture, 
and a genial freedom and play of mind — this union was his own ; 
and it" was through this that Erasmus embodied for the Teutonic 
peoples the quickening influence of the New Learning during the 
long scholar-life which began at Paris and ended amid darkness 
and sorrow at Basle. At the time of Colet's return from Italy 
Erasmus was young and comparatively unknown ; but the chival- 
rous enthusiasm of the new movement breaks out in his letters 
from Paris, whither he had wandered as a scholar. "I have given 
up ray whole soul to Greek learning," he writes ; " and as soon as 
I get any money I shall buy Greek books, and then I shall buy some 
clothes." It was in despair of reaching Italy that the young scholar 
made his way to Oxford, as the one place on this side the Alps 
where he would be enabled, through tlie teaching of Grocyn, to ac- 
quire a knowledge of Greek. But he had no sooner arrived there 
than all feeling of regret vanished away. "I have found in Ox- 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ford," he writes, " so much polish and learning that now I hardly 
care about going to Italy at all, save for the sake of having been 
there. When I listen to my friend Colet, it seems like listening to 
Plato himself. Who does not wonder at the wide range of Grocyn's 
knowledge ? What can be more sesirching, deep, and refined than 
the judgment of Linacre ? When did Nature mould a temper moi*e 
gentle, endearing, and happy than the temper of Thomas More ?" 
But the new movement was already spreading beyond the bounds of 
Oxford. If, like every other living impulse, it shrank from the cold 
suspicion of the King, it found shelter under the patronage of his 
minister. Immersed as Archbishop Warham was in the business 
of the state, he was no mere politician. The eulogies which Eras- 
mus lavished on him while he lived, his praises of the Primate's 
learning, of his ability in business, his pleasant hiimor, his modesty, 
his fidelity to friends, may pass for what eulogies of living men are 
commonly w^orth. But it is difficult to doubt the sincerity of the 
glowing picture which he drew of him when death had destroyed 
all interest in mere adulation. The letters indeed which passed be- 
tween the great churchman and the wandering scholar, the quiet, 
simple-hearted grace which amid constant instances of munificence 
preserved the perfect equality of literary friendship, the enlighten- 
ed piety to which Erasmus could address the noble words of his 
preface to St. Jerome, confirm the judgment of every good man of 
Warham's day. In the simplicity of his life the Archbishop offered 
a striking contrast to the greater prelates of his time. He eared 
nothing for the pomp, the sensual pleasures, the hunting and dicing 
in which they too commonly indulged. An hour's pleasant reading, 
a quiet chat with some learned new-comer, alone broke the endless 
round of civil and ecclesiastical business. Few men reaHzed so thor- 
oughly as Warham the new conception of an intellectual and moral 
equality before which the old social distinctions of the world were 
to vanish away. His favorite relaxation was to sup among a group 
of scholarly visitors, enjoying their fun and retorting with fun of 
his own. But the scholar-world found more than supper or fun at 
the Primate's board. His purse was ever open to relieve their pov- 
erty. " Had I found such a patron in my youth," Erasmus wrote 
long after, " I too might have been counted among the fortunate 
ones." It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to 
Warham's board at Lambeth, and in spite of an unpromising begin- 
ning the acquaintance turned out wonderfully well. The Primate 
loved him, Erasmus wrote home, as if he were liis father or his 
brother, and his generosity surpassed that of all his friends. He 
offered him a sinecure, and when he declined it he bestowed on him 
a pension of a hundred crowns a year. When Erasmus wandered 
to Paris, it w^as Warham's invitation which recalled him to En- 
gland. When the rest of his patrons left him to starve on the sour 
beer of Cambridge, it was Warhani who sent him fifty angels. " I 
wish there were thirty legions of them," the old man puns in his 
good-humored way. 

The hopes of the little group of scholars were held in check dur- 



VI] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



319 



ing the life of Henry the Seventh by his suspicion and ill-will, but 
a " New Order," to use their own enthusiastic term, dawned on 
them with the accession of his son. Henry the Eighth had hardly 
completed his eighteenth year when he mounted the throne, but the 
beauty of his person, his vigor and skill in arms, seemed only match- 
ed by the generosity of his temper and the nobleness of his political 
aims. The abuses- of the previous reign, the extortion of the royal 
treasury, were at once remedied. Empson and Dudley, the min- 
isters of his father's tyranny, were brought to the block, and the 
rights of the subject protected by a limitation of the time within 
which actions for recovery of its rights might be brought by the 
Crown. No accession ever excited higher expectations among a 
people than that of Henry the Eighth. Pole, his bitterest enemy, 
confessed at a later time, that the King was of a temper at the be- 
ginning of his reign " from which all excellent things might have 
been hoped." His sympathies were from the first openly on the 
side of the New Learning ; for Henry was not only himself a fair 
scholai', but even in boyhood had roused by his wit and attainments 
the wonder of Erasmiis. The great scholar hurried back to En- 
gland to pour out his exultation in the " Praise of Folly," his song 
of triumph over the old world of ignorance and bigotry which was 
to vanish away before the light and knowledge of the new reign. 
Folly, in his amusing little book, mounts a pulpit in cap and bells 
and pelts with her satire the absurdities of the world around her, 
the superstition of the monk, the pedantry of the grammarian, the 
dogmatism of the doctors of the schools, the cruelty of the sports- 
man. Gayly as it reads, the book was written in More's house to 
while away hours of sickness. The irony of Erasmus was backed 
by the earnestness of Colet. Four years before he had been called 
from Oxford to the deanery of St. Paul's, and he now became the 
great preacher of his day, the predecessor of Latimer in his simplic- 
ity, his directness, and his force. But for the success of the new 
reform,* a reform which could only be wrought out by the tranquil 
spread of knowledge and the gradual enlightenment of the human 
conscience, the one needful thing was peace ; and the young King to 
whom the scholar-group looked was already longing for war. Long 
as peace had been established between the two countries, the designs 
of England upon the French crown had never been really abandoned. 
Edward the Fourth and Henry the Seventh had each threatened 
France with invasion, and only Avithdrawn on a humiliating pay- 
ment of large sums by Lewis the Eleventh. But the policy of 
Lewis, his extinction of the great feudatories, and the administrative 
centralization which he was the first to introduce, raised his king- 
dom ere the close of his reign to a height far above that of its Euro- 
pean rivals. The power of France, in fact, was only counterbalanced 
by that of Spain, which had become a great state through the union 
of Castile and Arragon, and where the prudence of Ferdinand was 
suddenly backed by the stroke of good fortune which had added the 
New World to the dominion of Castile. Too weak to meet Fi-ance 
single-handed, Henry the Seventh saw in an alliance with Spain, not 



520 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



merely a security against his " hereditary enemy," but an admirable 
starting-point in case of any English attemjDt for the recovery of 
Guienne, and this alliance had been cemented by the marriage of 
his eldest son, Arthur, with Ferdinand's daughtei", Catheiine of Ar- 
ragon. The match was broken by the death of the young bride- 
groom ; but Henry the Eighth clung to his father's policy, and a 
Papal dispensation enabled Catherine to wed the- brother of her late 
husband, the young sovereign himself. Throughout the first years 
of his reign, amid the tournaments and revelry which seemed to 
absorb his whole energies, Henry was in fact keenly watching the 
opening which the ambition of France began to afford for a re- 
newal of the old struggle. Under the successors of Lewis the 
Eleventh the efforts of the French monarchy had been directed to 
the conquest of Italy. Charles the Eighth, after entering Milan and 
Naples in triumph, had been driven back over the Alps, but Lewis 
the Twelfth had succeeded in establishing himself in Lombardy. 
A league of the Italian states was at last formed for his expulsion, 
with the Pope at its head, and to this league Spain and England 
gave their joint support. Of all the confederates, however, Henry 
alone reaped no profit from the war. "The barbarians," to use tlie 
phrase of Julius the Second, "were chased beyond the Alps;" but 
Ferdinand's unscrupulous adroitness only used the English force, 
which had landed at Fontarabia with the view of recovering 
Guienne, to cover his own conquest of Navarre. The shame of this 
fruitless campaign roused in Henry a fiercer spirit of aggression ; he 
landed in person in the North of France, and a sudden rout of the 
French cavalry in an engagement near Guinegate, which received 
from its bloodless character the name of the Battle of the Spurs, 
gave him the fortresses of Terouenne and Tournay. The young 
conqueror was eagerly pressing on from this new base of action to 
the recovery of his " heritage of France," when he found himself 
suddenly left alone by the desertion of Ferdinand and the dissolu- 
tion of the league. The millions left by his father were exhausted, 
his subjects had been drained by repeated subsidies, and, furious 
as he was at the treachery of his allies, Henry was driven to con- 
clude an inglorious peace. 

To the hopes of the New Learning this sudden outbreak of the 
spirit of war, this change of the monarch from whom they had 
looked for a " new order" into a vulgar conqueror, proved a bitter 
disappointment. Colet thundered from the pulpit of St. Paul's, 
that " an unjust peace is better than the justest war," and protest- 
ed that " when men out of hatred and ambition fight with and de- 
stroy one another, they fight under the banner, not of Christ, but 
of the devil." Erasmus quitted Cambridge with a bitter satire 
against the " madness" around him. " It is the people," he said, 
in words which must have startled his age, " it is the people who 
build cities, while the madness of princes destroys them." The 
sovereigns of his time appeared to him like ravenous birds pouncing 
with beak and claw on the hard-won wealth and knowledge of man- 
kind. " Kings who are scarcely man," he exclaimed in bitter 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



321 



irony, " are called ' divine ;' they are ' invincible,' though they fly 
from every battle-field ; ' serene,' though they turn the world upside 
down in a storm of war; 'illustrious,' though they grovel in igno- 
rance of all that is noble ; ' Catholic,' though they follow any thing 
rather than Clirist. Of all birds the eagle alone has seemed to wise 
men the type of royalty, a bird neither beautiful, nor musical, nor 
good for food, but murdei'ous, greedy, hateful to all, the curse of all, 
and with its great powers of doing harm only surpassed by its de- 
sire to do it." It was the first time in modern history that religion 
had formally dissociated itself from the ambition of princes and the 
liorrors of war, or that the new spirit of criticism had ventured not 
only to question but to deny what had till then seemed the prima- 
ry truths of political order. We shall soon see to what further 
length the new speculations were pushed by a greater thinker, but 
for the moment the indignation of the New Learning was diverted 
to more practical ends by the sudden peace. The silent influences 
of time were working, indeed, steadily for its cause. The printing- 
press was making letters the common property of all. In the last 
thirty years of the fifteenth century ten thousand editions of books 
and pamphlets are said to have been published throughout Europe, 
the most important half of them of course in Italy ; and all the Lat- 
in authors were accessible to every student before it closed. Al- 
most all the more valuable authors of Greece were published in the 
first twenty years of the century which followed. At the moment, 
thereK)re, of the Peace the profound influence of this burst of the 
two great classic literatures upon the world was just making itself 
felt. " For the first time," to use the picturesque phrase of M. 
Taine, " men opened their eyes and saw." The human mind seem- 
ed to gather new energies at the sight of the vast field which open- 
ed before it. It attacked every province of knowledge, and in a 
few years it transformed all. Experimental science, the science of 
philology, the science of politics, the critical investigation of relig- 
ious truth, all took their origin from this Renascence — this " New 
Birth" of the world. Art, if it lost much in purity and propriety, 
gained in scope and in the fearlessness of its love of nature. Lit- 
erature, if crushed for the moment by the overpowering attraction 
of the great models of Greece and Rome, revived with a grandeur 
of form, a large spirit of humanity, such as it had never known since 
their day. In England, the influence of the new movement extend- 
ed far beyond the little group in which it had a few years before 
seemed concentrated. The great churchmen still remained its pa- 
trons. Langton, Bishop of Worcester, took delight in examining 
the young scholars of his episcopal family every evening, and sent 
all the most promising of them to study across the Alps. Arch- 
bishop Warham, in a similar spirit, sent Croke for education to 
Leipsic and Louvain. Cuthbert Tunstall and Hugh Latimer, men 
destined to strangely different fortunes, went to study together at 
Padua. Henry himself, bitterly as he had disappointed its hopes, 
remained the steady friend of the New Learning. Through all the 
strange changes of his terrible career the King's court was the 

21 



322 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



home of letters. Even as a boy his son, Edward the Sixth, was a 
fair scholar in both the classical languages. His daughter Mary- 
wrote good Latin letters. Elizabeth, Avho spoke French and Italian 
as fluently as English, began every day with an hour's reading in 
the Greek Testament, the tragedies of Sophocles, or the orations of 
Isocrates and Demosthenes. Widely as Henry's ministers differed 
from one another, they all agreed in sharing and protecting tlie 
culture around them. 

The war, therefore, was hardly over, when the New Learning 
entered on its work of reform with an energy which contrasted 
strangely with its recent tone of despair. The election of Leo the 
Tenth, the fellow-student of Linacre, the friend of Erasmus, seemed 
to give it the control of Christendom. The age of the turbulent, 
ambitious Julius was thought to be over, and the new Pope de- 
clared formally for a universal peace. " Leo," wrote an English 
agent at his Court, in words to which after-history lent a strange 
meaning, " would favor literature and the arts, busy himself in 
building, and enter into no war save through actual compulsion." 
England, under the new ministry of Wolsey, withdrew from any 
active interference in the struggles of the Continent, and seemed as 
resolute as Leo himself for peace. Colet seized the opportunity to 
commence the work of educational reform by the foundation of his 
own grammar school beside St. Paul's. The bent of its founder's 
mind was shown by the image of the child Jesus which stood over 
its gate, with the words "Hear ye Him" graven beneath it. "Lift 
up your little white hands for me," wrote the dean to his scholars, in 
words which show the tenderness that lay beneath the stern outer 
seeming of the man — "for me which prayeth for you to God." AIL 
the educational designs of the reformers were carried out in the new 
foundation. The old methods of instruction were superseded by 
fresh grammars composed by Erasmus and other scholars for its use. 
Lilly, an Oxford student Avho had studied Greek in the East, was 
placed at its head. The injunctions of the founder aimed at the union 
of rational religion with sound learning, at the exclusion of the scho- 
lastic logic, and at the steady diffusion of the two classical literatures. 
The more bigoted of the clergy were quick to take alarm. " No 
wonder," More wrote to the dean, " your school raises a storm, for it 
is like the wooden horse in which armed Greeks were hidden for the 
ruin of barbarous Troy." But the cry of alarm passed helplessly 
away. Not only did the study of Greek creep gradually into the 
schools which existed, but the example of Colet was followed by a 
crowd of imitators. More grammar schools, it has been said, were 
founded in the latter years of Henry than in the three centuries be- 
fore. The impulse grew happily stronger as the direct influence of 
the New Learning passed away. The gramniar schools of Edward 
the Sixth and of Elizabeth, in a word the system of middle-class 
education which by the close of the century had changed the very 
face of England, Avere the direct results of Colet's foundation of St. 
Paul's. But the " armed Greeks" of More's apologue found a yet 
wider field in the reform of the higher education of the countrv- 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



323 



On the universities the influence of the New Learning was like a 
passing from death to life. Erasmus gives us a picture of what 
happened at Cambridge, where he was himself for a time a teacher 
of Greek. " Scarcely thirty years ago nothing was taught here but 
the 'Parva Logicalia' of Alexander, antiquated exercises from Aris- 
totle, and the ' Qusestiones' of Scotus, As time went on better 
studies were added — mathematics, a new, or at any rate a renovated, 
Aristotle, and a knowledge of Greek literature. What has been the 
result ? The miiversity is now so flourishing that it can compete 
with the best universities of the age." Latimer and Croke return- 
ed from Italy and carried on the M^ork of Erasmus at Cambridge, 
where |Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, himself one of the foremost 
scholars of the new movement, lent it his powerful support. At 
Oxford the revival met with a fiercer opposition. The contest took 
the form of boyish frays, in which the young partisans and oppo- 
nents of the New Learning took sides as Greeks and Trojans. The 
King himself had to summon one of its fiercest enemies to Wood- 
stock, and to impose silence on the tirades which were delivered 
from the university pulpit. The preacher alleged that he was car- 
ried away by the Spirit. " Yes," retorted the King, " by the spirit 
not of wisdom, but of folly." But even at Oxford the contest was 
soon at an end. Fox, Bishop of Winchester, established the first 
Greek lecture there in his new college of Corpus Christi, and a pro- 
fessorship of Greek was at a later time established by the Crown. 
"The students," wrote an eye-witness, "rush to Greek letters; they 
endure Avatching, fasting, toil, and hunger in the pursuit of them." 
The work was crowned at last by the munificent foundation of Car- 
dinal College, to share in whose teaching Wolsey invited the most 
eminent of the living scholars of Europe, and for whose library he 
promised to obtain copies of all the manuscripts in the Vatican. 

As Colet had been the first to attempt the reform of English 
education, so he was the first to undertake the reform of the 
Church. Wai-ham still flung around the movement his steady pro- 
tection, and it was by his commission that Colet was enabled to 
address the Convocation of the Clergy in words which set before 
them with unsparing severity the religious ideal of the New Learn- 
ing. "Would that for once," burst forth the fiery preacher, "you 
would remember your name and profession and take thought for 
the reformation of the Church ! Never was it more necessary, and 
never did the state of the Church need more vigorous endeavors." 
" We are troubled with heretics," he went on, " but no heresy of 
theirs is so fatal to us and to the people at large as the vicious and 
depraved lives of the clergy. That is the worst heresy of all." It 
was the reform of the bishops that must precede that of the clergy, 
the reform of the clei'gy that would lead to a general revival of re- 
ligion in the people at large. The accumulation of benefices, the 
luxury and worldliness of the priesthood, must be abandoned. The 
prelates ought to be busy preachers, to forsake the Court and labor 
in their own dioceses. Care should be taken for the ordination 
and promotion of worthier ministers, residence should be enforced^ 



324 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the low standard of clerical morality should be raised. It is plain 
that Colet looked forward, not to a reform of doctrine, but to a re- 
form of life; not to a revolution which should sweep away the older 
sujDcrstitions which he despised, but to a regeneration of spiritual 
feeling before which they would inevitably vanish. He was at once 
charged, howevei', with heresy, but Warham repelled the charge 
with disdain. Henry himself, to whom Colet had been denounced, 
bade him go boldly on. "Let every man have his own doctor," 
said the young King, after a long interview, "and let every man 
favor his own, but this man is the doctor for me." Still more 
marked than Warham's protection of Colet was the patronage 
which the Primate extended to the efforts of Erasmus. His edi- 
tion of the works of St. Jerome had been begun under Warham's 
encouragement during the great scholar's residence at Cambridge, 
and it appeared with a dedication to the Archbishop on its title- 
page. That Erasmus could find protection in Warham's name for 
a work which boldly recalled Christendom to the path of sound 
Biblical criticism, that he could address him in words so outspoken 
as those of his preface, shows how fully the Primate sympathized 
with the highest efforts of the New Learning. Nowhere had the 
spirit of inquiry so firmly set itself against the claims of authority. 
" Synods and decrees, and even councils," wrote Erasmus, " are by 
no means, in my judgment, the fittest modes of repressing error, 
unless truth depend simply on authority. But, on the contrary, the 
more dogmas there are, the more fruitful is the ground in produ- 
cing heresies. Never was the Christian faith purer or more unde- 
filed than when the world was content with a single creed, and that 
the shortest creed we have." It is touching even now to listen to ' 
such an appeal of reason and of culture against the tide of dogma* 
tism which was soon to flood Christendom with Aiigsburg Confes- 
sions, and Creeds of Pope Pius, and Westminster Catechisms, and 
Thirty-nine Articles. The principles which Erasmus urged in his 
"Jerome" were urged with far greater clearness and force in a 
work which laid the foundations of the future Reformation, the 
edition of the Greek Testament on which he had been engaged at 
Cambridge, and whose production was almost wholly due to the en- 
couragement and assistance he received from English scholars. In 
itself the book was a bold defiance of theological tradition. It set 
aside the Latin version of the Vulgate, which had secured universal 
acceptance in the Church, Its method of interpretation was based 
not on received dogmas, but on the literal meaning of the text. Its 
real end was the end at which Colet had aimed in his Oxford lec- 
tures. Erasmus desired to set Christ himself in the j^lace of the 
Church, to recall men from the teachings of Christian theologians 
to the teachings of the Founder of Christianity. The whole value 
of the Gospels to him lay in the vividness with which they brought 
home to their readers the personal impression of Christ himself. 
" Were we to have seen him with our own eyes, we should not have 
so intimate a knowledge as they give us of Christ, speaking, heahng, 
dying, rising again, as it were, in our very presence." All the su- 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



325 



perstitions of mediaeval worship faded away in the light of this per- 
sonal worship of Christ. " If the foot-prints of Christ are shown us 
in any place, we kneel down and adore them. Why do we not rath- 
er venerate the living and breathing picture of him in these books? 
We deck statues of Avood and stone with gold and gems for the 
love of Christ. Yet they only profess to represent to us the outer 
form of his body, while these books present us with a living picture 
of his holy mind." In the same way the actual teaching of Christ 
Avas made to supersede the mysterious dogmas of the older eccle- 
siastical teachings. "As though Christ taught such subtleties," 
burst out Erasmus : " subtleties that can scarcely be understood even 
by a few theologians — or as though the strength of the Christian 
religion consisted in man's ignorance of it ! It may be the safer 
course," he goes on, with characteristic irony, " to conceal the state 
mysteries of kings, but Christ desired his mysteries to be spread 
abroad as openly as was possible." In the diffusion, in the universal 
knowledge of the teaching of Christ the foundation of a reformed 
Christianity had still, he urged, to be laid. With the tacit approval 
of the Primate of a Church which from the time of Wyclif had 
held the translation and reading of the Bible in the common tongue 
to be heresy and a crime punishable with the fire, Erasmus boldly 
avows his wish for a Bible open and intelligible to all. " I wish 
that even the Aveakest woman might read the gospels and the epis- 
tles of St. Paul. I Avish that they were translated into all lan- 
guages, so as to be read and understood not only by Scots and 
Irishmen, but even by Saracens and Turks. But the first step to 
their being read is to make them intelligible to the reader. I long 
for the day Avhen the husbandman shall sing portions of them to 
himself as he follows the ploAv, Avhen the Aveaver shall hum them 
to the time of his shuttle, Avhen the traveler shall while aAvay Avith 
their stories the weariness of his journey." The New Testament 
of Erasmus became the topic of the day ; the Court, the universi- 
ties, every household to which the New Learning had penetrated, 
read and discussed it. But bold as its language may have seemed, 
Warham not only expressed his approbation, but lent the work — as 
he Avrote to its author — " to bishop after bishop." The most in- 
fluential of his suffragans, Bishop Fox of Winchester, declared that 
the mere version Avas Avorth ten commentaries : the most learned, 
Fisher of Rochester, entertained Erasmus at his house. 

Daring and full of promise as were these efforts of the IsTcav 
Learning in the direction of educational and religious reform, its 
political and social speculations took a far wider range in the "Uto- 
pia" of Thomas More. Even in the household of Cardinal Morton, 
Avhere he had spent his childhood, More's precocious ability had 
raised the highest hopes. " Whoever may live to see it," the gray- 
haired statesman used to say, " this boy noAV waiting at table Avill 
turn out a marvelous man." We have seen the spell which his 
wonderful learning and the SAveetness of his temper threw at Ox- 
ford over Colet and Erasmus ; and, young as he Avas, More no soon- 
er quitted the university than he Avas known throughout Europe as 



326 



RISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



one of the foremost figures in the new movement. The keen ir- 
regular face, the gray restless eye, the thin mobile lips, the tumbled 
brown hair, the careless gait and dress, as they remain stamped on 
the canvas of Holbein, picture the inner soul of the man, his vivaci- 
ty, his restless, all -devouring intellect, his keen and even reckless 
wit, the kindly, half-sad humor that drew its strange veil of laugh- 
ter and tears over the deep, tender reverence of the soul within. 
In a higher, because in a sweeter and more lovable form than Co- 
let, More is the representative of the religious tendency of the New 
Learning in England. The young law-student who laughed at the 
superstition and asceticism of the monks of his day wore a hair 
shirt next his skin, and schooled himself by penances for the cell he 
desired among the Carthusians. It was characteristic of the man 
that among all the gay, profligate scholars of the Italian Renas- 
cence he chose as the object of his admiration the disciple of Sa- 
vonarola, Pico di Mirandola. Free-thinker as the bigots who listen- 
ed to his daring speculations termed him, his eye would brighten 
and his tongue falter as he spoke with friends of heaven and the 
after-life. When he took office, it was with the open stipulation 
" first to look to God, and after God to the King." But in his out- 
er bearing there was nothing of the monk or recluse. The bright- 
ness and fi'eedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the 
young scholar, with his gay talk, his winsomeness of manner, his 
reckless epigrams, his passionate love of music, his omnivorous 
reading, his paradoxical speculations, his jibes at monks, his school- 
boy fervor of liberty. But events were soon to jDrove that beneath 
this sunny nature lay a stern inflexibility of conscientious resolve. 
The Florentine scholars who penned declamations against tyrants 
had covered with their flatteries the tyranny of the house of Medi- 
ci. More had no sooner entered Parliament than his ready argument 
and keen sense of justice led to the rejection of the royal demand 
for a heavy subsidy. "A beardless boy," said the courtiers — and 
More was only twenty-three — " has disappointed the King's pur- 
pose;" and during the rest of Henry the Seventh's reign the young 
lawyer was forced to withdraw from public life. But the Avith- 
drawal had little effect on his buoyant activity. He rose at once 
into repute at the bar. He published his "Life of Edward the 
Fifth," the first work in which what we may call modern English 
prose appears written with purity and clearness of style and a fi'ee- 
dom either from antiquated forms of expression or classical ped- 
antry. His ascetic dreams were replaced by the affections of home. 
It is when we get a glimpse of him in his house at Chelsea that we 
understand the endearing epithets which Erasmus always lavishes 
upon More. The delight of the young husband was to train the 
girl he had chosen for his wife in his own taste for letters and 
for music. The reserve which the age exacted from parents was 
thrown to the winds in More's intercourse with his children. He 
loved teaching them, and lured them to their deeper studies by the 
coins and curiosities he had gathered in his cabinet. He was as 
fond of their pets and their games as his childi-en themselves, and 



VI-] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



327 



would take grave scholars and statesmen into the garden to see his 
girls' rabbit-hutches or to watch the gambols of their favorite mon- 
key. "I have given you kisses enough," he wrote to his little ones, 
in merry verse, when far away on political business, " but stripes 
hardly ever." The accession of Henry the Eighth dragged him 
back into the political current. It was at his house that Erasmus 
penned the " Praise of Folly," and the work, in its Latin title, " Mo- 
riae Encomium," embodied in playful fun his love of the extrava- 
gant humor of More. More " tried as hard to keep out of Court," 
says his descendant, " as most men try to get into it." When the 
charm of his conversation gave so much pleasure to the young sov- 
ereign " that he could not once in a month get leave to go home to 
his wife or children, whose company he much desired, ... .he began 
thereupon to dissemble his nature, and so, little by little, from his 
former mirth to dissemble himself." More shai'ed to the full the 
disappointment of his friends at the sudden outbreak of Henry's 
warlike temper, but the peace again drew him to the Court, he en- 
tered the royal service, and was soon in the King's confidence both 
as a councilor and as a diplomatist. 

It was on one of his diplomatic missions that More describes 
himself as hearing news of the kingdom of " Nowhere." " On a 
certain day when I had heard mass in Our Lady's Church, which 
is the fairest, the most gorgeous and curious church or building 
in all the city of Antwerp, and also most frequented of people, and 
service being over, I was ready to go home to my lodgings, I 
chanced to espy my friend, Peter Gilles, talking with a certain 
stranger, a man well stricken in age, with a black, sun-burned face, 
a lai-ge beard, and a cloke cast trimly about his shoulders, wlioni by 
his favor and apparell forthwith I judged to be a mariner." The 
sailor turned out to have been a companion of Amerigo Vespucci 
in those voyages to the New World " that be now in print and 
abroad in every man's hand," and on More's invitation he accom- 
panied him to his house, and "there in my garden upon a bench 
covered with green turves we sate down, talking together" of the 
man's marvelous adventures, his desertion in America by Vespucci, 
his wanderings over the country under the equinoctial line, and at 
last of his stay in the kingdom of " Nowhere." It was the story 
of " Nowhere," or Utopia, which More embodied in the wonderful 
book which reveals to us the heart of the New Learning. As yet 
the movement had been one of scholars and divines. Its plans of 
reform had been almost exclusively intellectual and religious. But 
in More the same free play of thought which had shaken off the old 
forms of education and faith turned to question the old forms of 
society and politics. From a world where fifteen hundred years of 
Christian teaching had produced social injustice, rehgious intoler- 
ance, and political tyranny, the humorist philosopher turned to a 
" Nowhere," in which the mere efforts of natural human virtue 
realized those ends of security, equality, brotherhood, and freedom 
for which the very institution of society seemed to have been framed. 
It is as he wanders through this dream-land of the new reason that 



328 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



More touches the great pvobleras which were fast opening before 
the modern world, problems of labor, of crime, of conscience, of 
government. Merely to have seen and to have examined questions 
such as these would prove the keenness of his intellect, but its far- 
reaching originality is shown in the solutions which he proposes. 
Amid much that is the pure play of an exuberant fancy, much that 
is mere recollection of the dreams of by-gone dreamers, we find 
again and again the most important social and political discoveries 
of later times anticipated by the genius of Thomas More. In some 
points, such as his treatment of the question of labor, he still re- 
mains far in advance of current opinion. The whole system of 
society around him seemed to liim " nothing but a conspiracy of 
the rich against the poor." Its economic legislation Avas simply 
the carrying out of such a conspiracy by process of law. "The 
rich are ever striving to pare away something further from the 
daily wages of the poor by private fraud and even by public law, 
so that the wrong already existing (for it is a wrong that those from 
whom the state derives most benefit should receive least reward) 
is made yet greater by means of the law of the state." " The rich 
devise every means by which they may in the first place secure to 
themselves what they have amassed by Avrong, and then take to 
their own use and profit at the lowest possible price the work and 
labor of the poor. And so soon as the rich decide on adopting 
these devices in the name of the public, then they become law." 
The result was the wretched existence to which the labor-class was 
doomed, " a life so wretched that even a beast's life seems envia- 
ble." No such cry of pity for the poor, of protest against the 
system of agrarian and manufacturing tyranny which found its-ex-* 
pression in the Statutes of Laborers, had been heard since the days 
of Piers Ploughman. But from Christendom More turns with a 
smile to "Nowhere." In "Nowhere" the aim of legislation is to 
secure the welfare, social, industrial, intellectual, religious, of the 
community at large, and of the labor-class as the true basis of a 
well-ordered commonwealth. The end of its labor-laws was simply 
the welfare of the laborer. Goods were possessed indeed in com- 
mon, but labor was compulsory with all. The period of toil was 
shortened to the nine hours demanded by modern artisans, with a 
view to the intellectual improvement of the worker. "In the in- 
stitution of the weal public this end is only and chiefly pretended 
and minded that what time may possibly be spared from the neces- 
sary occupations and affairs of the commonwealth, all that the citi- 
zens should withdraw from bodily service, to the free liberty of 
the mind and garnishing of the same. For herein they conceive 
the felicity of this life to consist." A public system of education 
enabled the Utopians to avail themselves of their leisure. While 
in England half of the population " could read no English," every 
child was well taught in " Nowhere." The physical aspects of so- 
ciety were cared for as attentively as its moral. The houses of 
Utopia " in the beginning were very low, and like homely cottages 
or poor shepherd huts made at all adventures of every rude piece 



VL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



329 



of timber that came first to hand, with mud walls, and ridged roofs 
thatched over with straw." The picture was really that of the com- 
mon English town of More's day, the home of squalor and pesti- 
lence. In Utopia, however, they had at last come to realize the con- 
nection between public morality and the health which S2:)rings from 
light, air, comfort, and cleanliness, " The streets were twenty feet 
broad ; the houses backed by spacious gardens, and, curiously build- 
ed after a gorgeous and gallant sort, with their stories one after an- 
other. The outsides of the walls be made either of hard flint, or of 
plaster, or else of brick; and the inner sides be well strengthened 
by timber work. The roofs be plain and flat, covered over with 
plaster so tempered that no fire can hurt or perish it, and with- 
standing the violence of the weather better than any lead. They 
keep the wind out of their windows with glass, for it is there much 
used, and sometimes also with fine linen cloth dipped in oil or amber, 
and that for two commodities, for by this means more light cometh 
in and the wind is better kept out." 

The same foresight which appears in More's treatment of the 
questions of labor and the public health is yet more apparent in his 
treatment of the question of crime. He was the first to suggest 
that punishment was less effective in supjDressing it than prevention. 
" If you allow your people to be badly taught, their morals to be 
corrupted from childhood, and then when they are men punish 
them for the very crimes to which they have been trained in child- 
hood — what is tins but first to make thieves, and then to punish 
them?" He was the first to plead for proportion between the 
punishment and the crime, and to point out the folly of the cruel 
penalties of his day. " Simple theft is not so great an offense as 
to be punished with death." If a thief and a murderer are sure 
of the same penalty, he points out that the law is simply tempting 
the thief to secure his theft by murder. " While we go about to 
make thieves afraid, we are really provoking them to kill good 
men." The end of all punishment he declares to be reformation, 
"nothing else but the destruction of vice and the saving of men." 
He advises "so using and ordering criminals that they can not 
choose but be good ; and what harm soever they did before, the 
residue of their lives to make amends for the same." Above all, 
lie urges that to be remedial punishment must be wrought out by 
labor and hope, so that none is hoj)eless or in despair to recover 
again his former state of freedom by giving good tokens and like- 
lihood of himself that he will ever after that live a true and honest 
man." It is not too much to say that in the great principles More 
lays down he anticipated every one of the improvements in our 
criminal system which have distinguished the last hundred years. 
His treatment of the religious question was even more in advance 
of his age. If the houses of Utopia were strangely in contrast with 
the halls of England, where the bones from every dinner lay rotting 
in the dirty straw which strewed the floor, where the smoke curled 
about the rafters, and the wind whistled through the -unglazed win- 
dows ; if its penallegislation had little likeness to the gallows which 



330 



SIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Seo. v. stood out so frequently against our English sky ; the religion of 
" Nowhere" was in yet stronger conflict with the faith of Christen- 
dom. It rested simply on nature and reason. It held that God's 
design was the happiness of man, and that the ascetic rejection of 
human delights, save for the common good, was thanldessness to 
the Giver. Christianity, indeed, had already reached Utopia, but it 
had few priests ; religion found its centre rather in the family than 
in the congregation : and each household confessed its faults to its 
own natural head. A yet stranger characteristic was seen in the 
peaceable way in which it lived side by side with the older relig- 
ions. More than a century before William of Orange, More dis- 
cerned and proclaimed the great principle of religious toleration. 
In " Nowhere" it was lawful to every man to be of what rehgion he 
would. Even the disbelievers in a Divine Being or in the immor- 
tality of man, who by a single exception to its perfect religious in- 
difference were excluded from public office, were excluded, not on 
the ground of their religious belief, but because their opinions were 
believed to be degrading to mankind, and therefore to incapacitate 
those who held them from governing in a noble temper. But even 
these were subject to no punishment, because the people of Utopia 
were "persuaded that it is not in a man's power to believe wliat he 
list." The religion which a man held he might propagate by ar- 
gument, though not by violence or insult to the religion of others. 
But while each sect performed its rites in private, all assembled for 
public worship in a spacious temple, where the vast throng, clad in 
white, and grouped round a priest clothed in fair raiment wrought 
marvelously out of birds' plumage, joined in hymns and prayers so 
framed as to be acceptable to all. The importance of this public ' 
devotion lay in the evidence it afforded that liberty of conscience 
could be combined with religious unity. 



Section v.— Wolsey. 1515—1531. 

\_Authorities. — The chronicler Hall, who wrote under Edwai'd the Sixth, has been 
copied for Henry the Eighth's reign by Grafton, and followed by Holinshed. But 
for any real knowledge of Wolsey's administration we must turn to the invaluable 
prefaces which Professor Brewer has prefixed to the Calendars of State Papers for 
this period, and to the State Papers themselves.] 



" There are many things in the commonwealth of Nowhere which 
I rather wish than hope to see adopted in our own." It was with 
these words of characteristic irony that More closed the great Avork 
which embodied the dreams of the New Learning, Destined as 
they were to fulfillment in the course of ages, its schemes of social, 
religious, and political reform broke helplessly against the temper 
of the time. At the very moment when More was pleading the 
cause of justice between rich and poor, the agrarian discontent was 
being fanned by exactions into a fiercer flame. While lie aimed 
sarcasm after sarcasm against king-worship, despotism was being 



VI.1 



THE NEW MONABCRY. 



231 



organized into a system. His advocacy of the two principles of re- 
ligious toleration and Christian comprehension coincides almost to 
a year with the opening of the strife between the Reformation and 
the Papacy. 

"That Luther has a fine genius," laughed Leo the Tenth, when 
he heard that a German professor had nailed some propositions 
denouncing the abuse of indulgences, or of the Papal power to re- 
mit certain penalties attached to the commission of sins, against the 
doors of the church at Wittenberg. But the " Quarrell of Friars," 
as the controversy was termed contemptuously at Rome, soon took 
larger proportions. If at the outset Luther flung himself " pros- 
trate at the feet" of the Papacy, and owned its voice as the voice of 
Christ, the formal sentence of Leo no sooner confirmed the doctrine 
of indulgences than their opponent appealed to a future council of 
the Church. Two years later the rupture was complete. A Papal 
bull formally condemned the errors of the Reformer. The con- 
demnation was met with defiance, and Luther publicly consigned 
the bull to the flames. A second condemnation expelled him from 
the bosom of the Church, and the ban of the Empire was soon add- 
ed to that of the Papacy. " Here stand I ; I can none other," Lu- 
ther ref)lied to the young Emperor, Charles the Fifth, as he pressed 
him to recant in the Diet of Worms ; and from the hiding-place in 
the Thuringian Forest where he was sheltered by the Elector of 
Saxony he denounced not merely, as at first, the abuses of the Pa- 
pacy, but the Papacy itself. The heresies of Wyclif .were revived ; 
the infallibility, the authority of the Roman See, the truth of its 
doctrines, the efficacy of its worship, were denied and scoffed at in 
the vigorous pamphlets which issued from liis retreat, and were dis- 
persed throughout the world by the new printing-press. The old 
resentment of Germany against the oppression of Rome, the moral 
revolt in its more religious minds against the secularity and cor- 
ruption of the Church, the disgust of the New Learning at its 
superstition and ignorance, combined to secure for Luther a wide- 
spread popularity and the protection of the northern princes of the 
empire. In England, however, his protest found as yet no echo : 
its only effect indeed was to rouse again the old spirit of persecu- 
tion. Luther's works were solemnly burned in St. Paul's, heretical 
pubhcations were ordered to be delivered up, and fresh orders were 
issued for the prosecution of heretics in the bishops' courts. The 
young King himself, proud of a theological knowledge in which he 
stood alone among the sovereigns of Enrope, entered the lists 
against Luther with an "Assertion of the Seven Sacraments," for 
which he was rewarded by Leo with the title of " Defender of the 
Faith." The insolent abuse of the Reformer's answer called More 
and Fisher into the field. As yet the New Learning, though scared 
by Luther's intemperate language, had steadily backed him in his 
struggle. Erasmus pleaded for him with the Emperor ; TJlrich 
von Hutten attacked the friars in satires and invectives as violent 
as his own. But the temper of the Revival was even more antago- 
nistic to the temper of Luther than that of Rome itself. From the 



332 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec.v. I golden dream of a new age, wrought peaceably and purely by the 
slow progi-ess of intelligence, the growth of letters, the development 
of human virtue, the Reformer of Wittenberg turned away with 
horror. He had httle or no sympathy with the new culture. He 
despised reason as heartily as any Papal dogmatist could despise it. 
He hated the very thought of toleration or comprehension. He 
had been driven by a moral and intellectual compulsion to declare 
the Roman system a false one, but it was only to rei^lace it by an- 
other system of doctrine just as elaborate, and claiming precisely the 
same infallibility. To degrade human nature was to attack the very 
base of the New Learning ; but Erasmus no sooner advanced to its 
defense than Luther declared man to be utterly enslaved by original 
sin, and incapable through any efforts of his own of discovering 
truth or of arriving at goodness. Such a doctrine not only annihi- 
lated the piety and wisdom of the classic past, from which the New 
Learning had drawn its larger views of life and of the M'orld ; it 
trampled in the dust reason itself, the very instrument by which 
More and Erasmus hoped to regenerate both knowledge and relig- 
ion. To More especially, with his keener perception of its future 
effect, this sudden revival of a purely theological and dogmatic 
spirit, severing Christendom into warring camps, and annihilating 
ail hopes of union and tolerance, was especially hateful. The tem- 
per which hitherto had seemed so " endearing, gentle, and happy," 
suddenly gave way. His reply to Luther's attack upon the King 
sank to the level of the work it answered. That of Fisher was 
calmer and more argumentative ; but the divorce of the New Learn- 
ing from the Reformation was complete. 

"Nor were the political hopes of the "Utopia" destined to be 
realized by the minister who at the close of Henry's early war wi^h 
France mounted rapidly into power. Thomas Wolsey, the son of 
a wealthy to'wnsman of Ipswich, who had risen to the post of royal 
chaplain, was taken by Bishop Fox, at the death of Henry the Sev- 
enth, into the political service of the Crown. His extraordinary 
abilities hardly perhaps required the songs, dances, and carouses 
with his indulgence in which he was taunted by his enemies, to aid 
him in winning the favor of the young sovereign. From the post 
of favorite he soon rose to that of minister. Henry's resentment at 
Ferdinand's perfidy and at the ridiculous results of the vast efforts 
and expense of the war against France broke the Spanish alliance 
to which his father and the ministers whom his father had left him 
so steadily clung. The retirement of Fox made way for Wolsey, 
and the policy of the new statesman reversed that of his predeces- 
sors. It was the friendship of England which encouraged Francis 
the First to attempt the reconquest of Lombardy, and even his vic- 
tory of Marignano failed to rouse a jealousy of French aggression, 
though by treaties and subsidies to its opponents Wolsey managed 
to Umit the conquests of France to the Milanese. A French alliance 
meant simply a poHcy of peace, and the administration of Wolsey 
amid all its ceaseless diplomacy aimed steadily at keeping England 
out of war. The peace, as we have seen, restored the hopes of the 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



333 



New Learning ; it enabled Colet to reform education, Erasmus to 
undertake the regeneration of the Church, More to set on foot a 
new science of politics. But peace as Wolsey used it was fatal to 
English freedom. In the political hints which lie scattered over 
the " Utopia" More notes with bitter irony the advance of the new 
despotism. It was only in "Nowhere" that a sovereign was "re- 
movable on suspicion of a design to enslave his people." In En- 
gland the work of slavery was being quietly wrought, hints the 
great lawyer, through the law. " There will never be wanting 
some pretense for deciding in the King's favor ; as, that equity is 
on his side, or the strict letter of the law, or some forced interpre- 
tation of it; or if none of these, that the royal prerogative ought 
Avith conscientious judges to outweigh all other considerations." 
We are startled at the precision with which More maps out the ex- 
pedients by which the law-courts were to lend themselves to the 
advance of tyramiy till their crowning judgment in the case of ship- 
money. But behind these judicial expedients lay great principles 
of absolutism, which partly from the example of foreign monarchies, 
partly from the sense of social and political insecui'ity, and yet more 
from the isolated position of the Crown, were gradually Avinning 
their way in public opinion. " These notions," he goes boldly on, 
" are fostered by the maxim that the King can do no wrong, how- 
ever much he may wish to do it; that not only the property, but 
the persons of his subjects are his own ; and that a man has a right 
to no more than the King's goodness thinks fit not to take from 
him." In the hands of Wolsey these maxims were transformed 
into principles of state. The check which had been imposed on 
the royal power by the presence of great prelates and nobles at the 
Council was practically removed. All authority was concentrated 
in the hands of a single minister. The whole direction of home 
and foreign affairs rested with Wolsey alone; as chancellor he 
stood at the head of public justice ; his elevation to the office of 
legate rendered him supreme in the Church. Enormous as was 
the mass of work which he undertook, it was thoroughly done: 
his administration of the royal treasury was economical ; the num- 
ber of his dispatches is hardly less remarkable than the care be- 
stowed upon each ; as chancellor even More — his avowed enemy — 
confesses that he surpassed all men's expectation. The Court of 
Chancery, indeed, became so crowded with business, through the 
character for expedition and justice which it acquired under his 
rule, that subordinate courts — one of which, that of the Master of 
the Rolls, still remains — had to be created for its relief. It was 
this vast concentration of all secular and ecclesiastical power in a 
single hand which accustomed England to the personal government 
which began with Henry the Eighth ; and it was, above all, Wol- 
sey's long tenure of the whole Papal authority Avithin the realm, 
and the consequent suspension of appeals to Rome, that led men 
to acquiesce at a later time in Henry's religious supremacy. For 
great as Avas Wolsey's pride, he regarded himself and proclaimed 
himself simply as the creature of the King. Henry had munifi- 



334 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. V. 

WOI-BET. 

1515- 
1631. 



Wolsey 
and ttie 
Parlia- 
ment. 



1519. 



1522. 



cently rewarded his services to the Crown. He had been raised to 
the see of Lincoln and the archbishopric of York, the revenues of 
two other sees whose tenants Avere foreigners were in his hands, he 
was Bishop of Winchester and Abbot of St. Albans, he was in re- 
ceipt of pensions from France and Spain, while his official emolu- 
ments were enormous. His ambition was glutted at last with the 
rank of cardinal. His pomp was almost royal. A train of prel- 
ates and nobles followed him wherever he moved; his household 
was composed of five hundred persons of noble birth, and its chief 
posts Avere held by knights and barons of the realm. He spent his 
vast wealth with princely ostentation. Two of his houses, Hamp- 
ton Court and York House (under its name of Whitehall), were 
splendid enough to serve at his fall for royal palaces. Plis school 
at Ipswich was eclipsed by the glories of his foundation at Oxford, 
whose name of Cardinal College has been lost in its later title of 
Christ-church. But all this mass of power and wealth Wolsey held, 
and owned that he held, simply at the royal will. In raising his fa- 
vorite to the head of Church and of State, Henry was simply gath- 
ering all religious as Avell as all civil authority into his personal 
grasp. The nation which trembled before Wolsey learned to trem- 
ble before the King who could destroy Wolsey by a breath. 

That Henry's, will was supreme in the state was proved by his 
rough repudiation, after nine years of peace, of the policy on which 
all the Cardinal's plans of administration were based. The Span- 
ish cause was popular among the English nobility, and it was reso- 
lutely advocated by the Duke of Buckingham, who stood at their 
head. Wolsey met the Duke's opposition with a charge of trea- 
son, to which the fact of his descent from Edward the Third gave. 
a fatal weight. Buckingham had sworn that in the event of Hen- 
ry's ceasing to live he would bring the Cardinal's head to the block, 
and the boast was tortured into the crime of imagining the King's 
death. The peers were forced to doom the chief of their order to 
a traitor's punishment ; but. the Queen, Catherine of Arragon, still 
upheld the partisans of Spain, and Henry was himself weary of a 
policy of peace. Disappointed in his hopes of attaining the impe- 
rial crown on the death of Maximilian, he ceased to believe Wol- 
sey's flattering assurances that in the balanced contest between 
Spain and France he was the arbiter of Europe; Mobile the dream 
of " recovering his French inheritance," which he had never really 
abandoned, was carefully fed by his nephew Charles, who had in- 
herited Flanders as heir to the dukes of Burgundy, Austria as 
heir to Maximilian, and Castile as the son of Juniia, had mounted 
the throne of Arragon on the death of his grandfather, Ferdinand, 
and by his election as emperor had become in his earliest manhood 
the mightiest power in Christendom. It was in vain that Francis 
strove to retain Henry's friendship by an interview near Guisnes, 
to which the profuse expenditure of both monarchs gave the name 
of the Field of Cloth of Gold ; in vain that Wolsey endeavored to 
avert the struggle by conferences, and to delay the visit of Charles 
to England. The meeting of the Emperor with Henry at South- 



VL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



335 



ampton gave the signal for a renewal of the war. Henry was fas- 
cinated by the persuasions and promises of his young nephew, and 
the French alliance came to an end. In the first result of the new 
war policy at home we can see the reason for Wolsey's passionate 
adherence to a policy of peace. With the instinct of despotism he 
had seen that the real danger which menaced the new monarchy 
lay in the tradition of the English Parliament ; and though Henry 
had thrice called together the Houses to supply the expenses of his 
earlier struggle with France, Wolsey governed during eight years 
of peace Avithout once assembling them. The ordinary resources 
of the Crown, however, were inadequate to meet the expenses of 
war, but so strong was Wolsey's antipathy to Parliament that he 
resorted to a measure of arbitrary taxation whose success would 
have rendered it needless ever to convoke Parliament again, A 
forced loan was assessed upon the whole kingdom. Twenty thou- 
sand pounds were exacted from London; and its wealthier citizens 
were summoned before the Cardinal and required to give an ac- 
count of the value of their estates. Commissioners were dispatch- 
ed into every county for the pui'pose of assessment, and precepts 
were issued on their information, requiring in some cases supplies 
of soldiers, in others a tenth of a man's annual income, for the 
King's service. So poor, however, was the return, that in the fol- 
lowing year Wolsey was forced to summon Parliament and lay be- 
fore it the unprecedented demand of a property tax of twenty per 
cent. The demand Avas made by the Cardinal in person, but it 
was received with obstinate silence. It was in vain that Wolsey 
called on member after member to speak ; and his appeal to More, 
who had been elected to the chair of the House of Commons, was 
met by the Speaker's falling on his knees and representing his pow- 
erlessness to reply till he had received instructions from the House 
itself. The effort to overawe the Commons failed, and Wolsey no 
sooner withdrew than an angry debate began. Pie again returned 
to answer the objections which had been raised, and again the Com- 
mons foiled the unconstitutional attempt to influence their delibera- 
tions by refusing to discuss the matter in his presence. The strug- 
gle continued for a fortnight ; and though successful in procuring 
a subsidy, the Court party were forced to content themselves with 
less than half Wolsey's demand. His anger at this burst of sturdy 
independence flung back the Cardinal on the system of benevolences. 
A tenth was demanded from the laity, and a fourth from the cler- 
gy in every county by the royal commissioners. There were " sore 
grudging and murmuring " — Warhara wrote to the Court — " among 
the people." " If men should give their goods by a commission," 
snid the Kentish squires, " then it would be worse than the taxes of 
France, and England should be bond, not free." The keen political 
instinct of the nation already discerned that in the question of self- 
taxation was involved that of the very existence of freedom. The 
clergy put themselves in the forefront of the resistance, and preach- 
ed from every pulpit that the commission was contrary to the lib- 
erties of the realm, and that the King could take no man's goods 



336 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



but by process of law. So stirred was the nation that Wolsey bent 
to the storm, and offered to rely on the voluntary benevolences of 
each subject. But the act which declared all benevolences illegal 
was recalled to memory, and the demand was evaded by London, 
while the commissioners were driven out of Kent. A revolt, in- 
deed, which broke out in Suffolk was only prevented from spread- 
ing by the unconditional Avithdrawal of the royal demand. 

Wolsey's defeat saved English freedom for the moment; but 
the danger from which he shrank was not merely that of a conflict 
with the sense of liberty. The murmurs of the Kentish squires 
only swelled the ever-deepening voice of public discontent. If the 
condition of the land question in the end gave strength to the 
Crown by making it the security for public order, it became a ter- 
rible peril at every crisis of conflict between the monarchy and the 
land-owners. The steady rise in the price of wool was at this period 
giving a fresh impulse to the agrarian changes which had been go- 
ing steadily on for the last hundred years, to the throwing togetlier 
of the smaller holdings, and the introduction of sheep-farming on 
an enormous scale. The merchant classes, too, whose prosperity 
we have already noticed, were investing largely in land, and these 
"farming gentlemen and clerking knights," as Latimer bitterly 
styled them, were restrained by few traditions or associations in 
their eviction of the smaller tenants. The land, indeed, had been 
greatly underlet ; " that which went heretofore for twenty or forty 
pounds a year," we learn from the same source, " now is let for fifty 
or a hundred ;" and the new purchasers were quick in making profit 
by a general rise in rents. It had been only by the low scale of 
rent, indeed, that the small yeomanry class had been enabled to' 
exist. " My father," says Latimer, " was a yeoman, and had no 
lands of his own ; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by 
the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept 
half a dozen men. He had Avalk for a hundred sheep, and my 
mother milked thirty kine ; he was able and did find the King a 
harness with himself and his horse while he came to the place that 
he should receive the King's wages. I can remember that I buckled 
his harness when he went to Blackheath Field. He kept me to 
school : he married my sisters Avith five pounds apiece, so that he 
brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitali- 
ty for his poor neiglibors, and some alms he gave to the poor, and 
all this he did of the same farm, where he that now hath it payeth 
sixteen poiinds by year or more, and is not able to do any thing for 
his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink 
to the poor." The bitterness of ejection was increased by the iniq- 
uitous means which were often employed to bring it about. The 
farmers, if we believe More, were " got rid of either by fraud or 
force, or tired out with repeated wrongs into parting with their 
property." " In this way it comes to pass that these poor wretch- 
es, men, women, husbands, orphans, widows, parents with little chil- 
dren, householders greater in number than in wealth (for arable 
farming requires many hands, while one shepherd and herdsman 



VI.] 



THE NEW monarchy: 



will suffice fov a pasture farm), all these emigrate fi'ora their na- 
tive fields without knowing where to go." The sale of their scanty- 
household stuff drove them to wander homeless abroad, to be 
thrown into prison as vagabonds, to beg and to steal. Yet in 
the face of such a spectacle as this we still find the old complaint 
of scarcity of labor, and the old legal remedy for it in a fixed scale 
of wages. The social disorder, in fact, baffled Wolsey's sagacity, 
and he could find no better remedy for it than laws against the fur- 
ther extension of sheep-farms, and a terrible increase of public ex- 
ecutions. Both were alike fruitless. Inclosures and evictions went 
on as before. "If you do not remedy the evils which produce 
thieves," More urged with bitter truth, " the rigorous execution of 
justice in punishing thieves will be vain." But even More could 
only suggest a remedy which, efficacious as it was subsequently to 
prove, had yet to wait a century for its realization. " Let the wool- 
en manufacture be introduced, so that honest employment may be 
found for those whom want has made thieves, or will make thieves 
ere long." The mass of social disorder grew steadily greater ; while 
the break-up of the great military households of the nobles Avliich 
was still going on, and the return of wounded and disabled soldiers 
from the wars, introduced a yet more dangerous leaven of outrage 
and crime. 

This public discontent, as well as the exhaustion of the treasury, 
added bitterness to the miserable reslilt of the war. To France, in- 
deed, the struggle had been disastrous, for the loss of the Milanese 
and the capture of Francis the First in the defeat of Pavia laid her 
at the feet of the Emperor. But England, as before, gained noth- 
ing from two useless campaigns, and in the heat of Henry's dis- 
appointment Wolsey found it possible again to negotiate a peace. 
Falling back on his old policy, he drew closer the French alliance 
and gave a cautious support to Francis ; while he carefully abstain- 
ed from any part in the fresh war which broke out on the refusal 
of the French monarch to fulfill the terms by which he had pur- 
chased his release. But the Cardinal's mind was already dwelling 
on a step by which he hoped to make any new return to the Span- 
ish policy impossible. As a princess of Spain, and aunt to the Em- 
peror, the Queen, Catherine of Arragon, stood at the head of the 
Spanish party ; and Wolsey bitterly resented the part she had taken 
in tlie recent breach with France. But the death of child after 
child, and the want of a son, had already roused a superstitious 
dread in Henry's mind that his marriage with a brother's widow, 
though sanctioned by the Church, was marked with the curse of 
Heaven. In the King's dread, Wolsey saw the opportunity of sow- 
ing a deadly quarrel between England and Spain. From whatever 
quarter the notion of a divorce was first suggested to Henry, it was 
at once supported by the Cardinal. It was probably at his sug- 
gestion that doubts were expressed as to the validity of the King's 
marriage and on the legitimacy of its issue, the Lady Mary, by the 
French negotiators of the treaty of alliance. Wolsey was looking 
forward, not only to a breach with the Emperor, but to the supply- 

22 



338 



EISTOUY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ing Catherine's place with a princess of France. But the desires 
of Plenry outran the policy of his minister. His t-onscientious scru- 
ples were suddenly quickened by the charms of Anne Boleyn, a 
young lady of his court ; and this passion, neglected and despised 
by Wolsey as a mere intrigue of gallantry, was skillfully fanned by 
the gay beauty and dexterous reserve of Anne herself, as well as by 
the support of the Duke of Norfolk, with whose family her own was 
connected. At a moment when no communication had as yet been 
made to the world of his desire for a divorce, nor any application 
laid before the Pope for the annulling of his former marriage, Hen- 
ry suddenly announced to the Cardinal his resolve on the new union. 
The remonstrances which Wolsey offered on his knees were only 
atoned for by his promise of fresh zeal in the cause of the divorce. 
But the matter was no sooner divulged than its difficulties became 
manifest. In the Royal Council itself it received small support. 
The most learned of' the English bishops, Fisher of Rochester, de- 
clared openly against it. The English theologians, who were con- 
sulted on the validity of the Papal dispensation which had allowed 
Henry's marriage to take place, referred the King to the Pope for a 
decision of the question. The commercial classes shrank from a 
step which involved an irretrievable breach with the Emperor, who 
was master of their great market in Flanders. Above all, the in- 
iquity of the proposal jarred against the public conscience. But 
neither danger nor shame avtiiled against the King's willfulness 
and passion. Wolsey's suggestions of caution met only with re- 
proaches, and Henry's confidence Avas fatally lost as the Cardinal 
became suspected of covert opposition to his favorite project. Nor- 
folk and Anne Boleyn's father, created at a later time Lord Roch-' 
ford, who gained more and more the upper hand in the Council, 
pushed the divorce resolutely on. It was in vain that Clement the 
Seventh, perplexed at once by his wish to gratify Henry, his own 
conscientious doubts as to the possibility of the course proposed, 
and his terror of the Emperor, Avhose power was now predominant 
in Italy, suggested that the King should act on his own responsibil- 
ity. Henry was resolute in demanding a legal declaration of the 
invalidity of the Papal bull on Avhich his first marriage rested, and 
the Pope was forced at last to issue a commission to the Cardinals 
Wolsey and Campeggio for a trial of the facts on which the King's 
application was based. Months, however, passed in negotiations for 
the purpose of evading such an issue. The Cardinals pressed on 
Catherine the expediency of her withdrawal to a religious house, 
while Henry pressed on the Pope that of a settlement of the mat- 
ter by his formal declaration against the validity of the marriage. 
It was not till both efforts had failed that the Court met at the 
Blackfriars. The Queen, who saw in Wolsey her enemy rather than 
a judge, only appeared to offer an appeal to Clement; and on the 
refusal of the Cardinals to admit it she flung herself at Plenry's 
feet. " Sire," said Catherine, " I beseech you to pity me, a woman 
and a stranger, without an assured friend and without an indiffer- 
ent counselor. I take God to witness that I have always been to 



VI.] 



TEE NEW MONARCHY. 



539 



yon a true and loyal wife, that I have made it my constant duty to 
seek your pleasure, that I have loved all whom you loved, whether I 
have reason or not, whether they are friends to me or foes. I have 
been your wife for years, I have brought you many children. God 
knows that when I came to your bed I was a virgin, and I put it 
to your own conscience to say whether it was not so. If there be 
any offense which can be alleged against me, I consent to depart 
with infamy : if not, then I pray you to do me justice." The piteous 
appeal was wasted on a king who was already entertaining Anne 
Boleyn with royal state in his own palace. The case proceeded ; 
but Clement, who was now wholly in tlie Emperor's hands, had al- 
ready cited it before him at Rome; and the Cardinals, though as 
yet ignorant of the Pope's decision, decided on an adjournment for 
the purpose of consulting him as to the judgment they should pro- 
nounce. 

" Never did cardinal bring good to England," exclaimed Wol- 
sey's bitter enemy, the Duke of Suffolk, as the court adjourned. 
" Of all men living," Wolsey boldly retorted, " you, my lord duke, 
have the least reason to dispraise cardinals, for if I, a poor cardi- 
nal, had not been, you would not now have had a head on your 
shoulders wherewith to make such a brag in disrepute of us." But 
both the Cardinal and his enemies knew that the minister's doom 
was sealed, Henry, who had throughout suspected him of being no 
friend to his project, was furious af the sudden scruples of con- 
science which frustrated his will. Wolsey was at once banished 
from the Court, and a promise was extorted from her royal lover by 
Anne Boleyn to see him no more. The Duke of Norfolk, who took 
his place at the Council-board, was not only the head of her own 
party, but the chief opponent of the French alliance ; and his belief 
that the divorce had been hindered only by the ill-will of the Em- 
peror to Wolsey induced Henry to draw neai-er again to Spain, and 
to seek to obtain his object by negotiation with Charles himself. 
But the utter ruin of the discarded minister was necessary for the 
success of the new policy, and the Cardinal was at once prosecuted 
for a transgression of the Statute of Praemunire by holding his court' 
as legate within the realm.- Wolsey Avas prosti-ated by the blow. 
He offered to give up every thing he possessed if the King would 
but cease from his displeasure. " His face," wrote the French em- 
bassador, " is dwindled to half its natural size. In truth, his misery 
is such that his enemies. Englishmen as they are, can not help pity- 
ing him." Office and wealth were flung desperately at the King's 
feet, and for a time ruin seemed averted. A thousand boats full of 
London citizens covered the Thames to see the Cardinal's barge 
pass to the Tower, but he was permitted to retire to Esher, and 
Henry for the moment seemed content with his disgrace. Pardon 
was granted him on the surrender of his vast possessions to the 
Crown, and he was ordered to proceed at once to his archbishopric, 
the one dignity he was suffered to retain. But hardly a year had 
passed before his popularity in the North revived the jealousy of 
his political rivals, and on the eve of his installation feast he was ar- 



340 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



rested on a charge of high treason, and conducted by the Lieuten- 
ant of the Tower toward London. Ah-eady broken by his enormous 
labors, by internal disease, and the sense of his fall, the old man ac- 
cepted the arrest as a sentence of death. An attack of dysentery 
forced him to rest at the Abbey of Leicester, and as he reached the 
gate he said feebly to the brethren who met him, " I am come to 
lay ray bones among you." On his death-bed his thoughts still 
clung to the prince whom he had served. " He is a prince," said 
the dying man to the Lieutenant of the Tower, "of a most royal 
courage ; sooner than miss any part of his will, he will endanger one 
half of his kingdom ; and I do assure you I have often kneeled be- 
fore him, sometimes for three hours together, to persuade him from 
his appetite, and could not prevail. And, Master Knygton, had I but 
served God as diligently as I have served the King, He would not 
have given me over in my gray hairs. But this is my due reward 
•for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God, but only 
my duty to my prince." No words could paint with so terrible a 
truthfulness the spirit of the new monarchy, which Wolsey had 
done more than any of those who went before him to raise into an 
overwhelming despotism. All sense of loyalty to England, to its 
freedom, to its institutions, had utterly passed away. The one duty 
which fills the statesman's mind is a duty " to his prince," a prince 
whose personal will and appetite were overriding the highest in- 
terests of the state, trampling underfoot the wisest councils, and 
crushing with the blind ingratitude of a Fate the servants who op- 
posed him. But even Wolsey, while he recoiled from the mon- 
strous form which he had created, could hardly have dreamed of 
the work of destruction which the royal courage and yet more roy* 
al appetite of his master were to accomplish in the years to come. 



Section VI Tliomas Cromwell. 1530—1540. 

[Atithorities. — Cromwell's early life, as told by Eoxe, is a mass of fable ; what we 
really know of it may be seen conveniently put together in Dean Hook's "Life of 
Archbishop Cranmer." For his ministry, the only real authorities are the State 
Papers for this period, which are now being calendared for the Master of the Rolls. 
For the close of Sir Thomas More, see the touching account in his life by Roper. 
The more important documents for the reHgious history of the time will be found in 
Mr. Pocock's new edition of "Burnet's History of the Reformation;" those relat- 
ing to the dissolution of the monasteries, in the collection of letters on that subject 
pubhshedby the Camden Society, and in the " Original Letters" of Sir Henry Ellis. 
A mass of material of very various value has been accumulated by Strype in his col- 
lections, which begin at this time. Mr. Fronde's narrative (" History of England," 
A-ols. i., ii., iii.), though of great literary merit, is disfigured by a love of paradox, by 
hero-worship, and by a reckless defense of tyranny and crime. It possesses, during 
this period, little or no historical value.] 



The ten years which follow the fall of Wolsey are among the 
most momentous in our history. The new monarchy at last real- 
ized its power, and the work for which Wolsey had paved the way 
was carried out with a terrible thoroughness. The one great insti- 



VI.] 



TSE NEW MONABCKY. 



341 



tiition which could still offer resistance to the royal will was struck 
clown. The Church became a mere instrument of the central des- 
potism. The people learned their helplessness in rebellions easily- 
suppressed and avenged with ruthless severity. A reign of terror, 
organized with consummate and merciless skill, held England panic- 
stricken at Henry's feet. The noblest heads rolled on the block. 
Virtue and learning could not save Thomas More ; royal descent 
could not save Lady SaUsbury. The execution of queen after queen 
taught England that nothing was too high for Henry's " courage," 
or too sacred for his " appetite." Parliament assembled only to 
sanction acts of unscrupulous tyranny, or to build up by its own 
statutes the great fabric of absolute rule. All the constitutional 
safeguards of English freedom were swept away. Arbitrary tax- 
ation, arbitrary legislation, arbitrary imprisonment, were powers 
claimed without dispute and unsparingly exercised by the Crown. 

The history of this great revolution, for it is nothing less, is the 
history of a "^single man. In the whole line of English statesmen 
there is no one of whom we would willingly know so much, no one 
of whom we really know so little, as of Thomas Cromwell. When 
he meets us in Henry's service he is already past middle life ; and 
during his earlier years it is hardly possible to do more than disen- 
tangle a few fragmentary facts from the mass of fable which gath- 
ered round them. His youth was one of roving adventure ; wheth- 
er he was the son of a poor blacksmith at Putney or not, he could 
hardly have been more than a boy when he was engaged in the 
service of the Marchioness of Dorset. He must still have been 
young when he took part as a common soldier in the wars of Italy, 
a "ruffian," as he owned afterward to Cranme:*, in the most unscru- 
pulous school the world contained. But it was a school in which he 
learned lessons even more dangerous than those of the camp. He 
not only mastered the Italian language, but drank in the manners 
and tone of the Italy around him, the Italy of the Borgias and 
the Medici. It was with Italian versatility that he turned from the 
camp to the counting-house ; he was certainly engaged as the com- 
mercial agent to one of the Venetian merchants ; tradition finds him 
as a clerk at Antwerp, and history at last encounters him as a thriv- 
ing wool-merchant at Middleborough a few years after the opening 
of Henry's reign. By adding the trade of scrivener, something be- 
tween that of a banker and attorney, to his other occupations, as 
well as by advancing money to the poorer nobles, Cromwell contin- 
ued to amass wealth as years went on ; and on the outbreak of the 
second war with France, we find him a busy and influential member 
of the Commons in Parliament. Five years later the aim of his 
ambition was declared by his entrance into Wolsey's service. The 
Cardinal needed a man of business for the suppression of some 
smaller monasteries which he had undertaken, and for the transfer 
of their revenues to his foundations at Oxford and Ipswich. The 
task was an unpopular one, and it was carried out with a rough in- 
difference to the feelings it aroused which involved Cromwell in 
the hate which was gathering round his master. But his wonder- 



342 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



f al self-reliance and sense of power only broke upon the world at 
Wolsey's fall. Of the hundreds of dependents who waited on the 
Cardinal's nod, Cromwell was the only one who clung faithfully to 
him at the last. In the lonely hours of his disgi\ace at Esher, Wol- 
sey " made his moan unto Master Ci'omwell, who comforted him 
the best he could, and desired my lord to give him leave to go to 
London, where he would make or mar, which was always his com- 
mon saying." The next day saw him admitted to Henry's seiwice, 
but still vigorous in his exertions to save the Cardinal. It was to 
Cromwell's efforts in Parliament that Wolsey owed his escape from 
impeachment, and it was by him that the negotiations were con- 
ducted which permitted the fallen minister to retire to York. A 
general esteem seems to have rewarded this rare instance of fidel- 
ity to a ruined patron. " For his honest behavior in his master's 
cause he was esteemed the most faithfullest servant, and was of all 
men greatly commended." But Henry's protection rested on other 
grounds. The ride to London had ended in a private interview 
with the King, in which Cromwell boldly advised him to cut the 
knot of the divorce by the simple exercise of his own supremacy. 
The advice struck the key-note of the later policy by which the 
daring counselor was to change the whole face of Church and 
State, but Henry still clung to the hopes held out by his new min- 
isters, and shrank perhaps as yet from the bare absolutism to which 
Cromwell called him. The advice at any rate was concealed, and, 
though high in the King's favor, his new servant waited patiently 
the progress of events. 

For success in procuring the divorce Norfolk relied not only on 
the alliance and aid of the Emperor, but on the moral support which 
the project was expected to receive from the Parliament. The re- 
assembling of the two Houses marked the close of the system of 
Wolsey. It was a step in fact which we can hardly err in attribu- 
ting to the influence of the adherents whom Norfolk found in the 
party of the New Learning. To them, as to his mere political ad- 
versaries, the Cardinal's fall opened a prospect of better things. 
The dream of More in accepting the office of chancellor, if we may 
judge it from the acts of his brief ministry, seems to have been that 
of carrying out the religious reformation which had been demanded 
by Colet and Erasmus, while checking the spirit of revolt against 
the unity of the Church. His severities against the Protestants, 
exaggerated as they have been by polemic rancor, remain the one 
stain on a memory that knows no other. But it was only by a rigid 
severance of the cause of reform from what seemed to him the 
cause of revolution, that More probably hoped for a successful issue 
to the projects he laid before Parliament. The petition of the 
Commons sounded like an echo of Colet's famous address to the 
convocation. It attributed the growth of heresy not more to 
" frantic and seditious books published in the English tongue con- 
trary to the very true Catholic and Christian faith" than to " the 
extreme and uncharitable behavior of divers ordinaries." It remon- 
strated against the legislation of the clergy in convocation without 



VI.] 



TSU NEW MONARCHY. 



34J 



the King's assent or that of his subjects, the oppressive procedure 
of the Church courts, the abuses of ecclesia,stical patronage, and the 
excessive number of holy days. Henry referred the petition to the 
bishops, but their only reply was a refusal of redress. The new 
ministry persisted, however, in pushing through the Commons their 
bills for ecclesiastical reform. The questions of convocation and 
the bishops' courts were adjourned for further consideration, but 
the fees of the courts were curtailed, the clergy restricted from lay 
employments, pluralities restrained, and residence enforced. In 
spite of a dogged opposition from the bishops the bills received the 
assent of the^House of Lords, "to the great rejoicing of lay people, 
and the great displeasure of spiritual persons." The importance 
of the new measures lay really in the action of Parliament. They 
were an explicit announcement that church reform was now to be 
undertaken, not by the clergy, but by the people at large. On the 
other hand, it was clear that it would be carried out, not in a spirit 
of hostility, but of loyalty to the Church. The Commons forced 
from Bishop Fisher an apology for words which were taken as a 
doubt thrown on their orthodoxy. If Henry forbade the circula- 
tion of a translation of the Bible executed by Tyndale in a Prot- 
estant spirit, he carefully promised a more correct version. More 
devoted himself to the task of crushing, by a strict execution of the 
laws, the hopes raised in the minds of the sectaries by the fall of 
"Wolsey. But the domestic aims of the New Learning were foiled 
by the failure of the ministry in its negotiations for the divorce. 
The severance of the French alliance and the accession of the Span- 
ish party to power failed to detach Charles from his aunt's cause. 
The solemn remonstrance of the Parliament against the Pope's de- 
lay of justice produced little effect on Clement, who was now look- 
ing to the Emperor for the restoration of Florence to his Medicean 
-house. The ministers eagerly accepted the suggestion of a Cam- 
bridge scholar, Thomas Cranmer, that the universities of Europe 
should be called on for their judgment ; but the appeal to the learn- 
ed opinion of Christendom ended in utter defeat. In France the 
profuse bribery of the English agents would have failed with the 
University of Paris but for the interference of Francis himself. As 
shameless an exercise of Henry's own authority was required to 
wring an approval of his cause from Oxford and Cambridge. In 
Germany the very Protestants, in the fervor of their moral revival, 
were dead against the King. So far as could be seen from Cran- 
mer's test, every learned man in Christendom condemned Henry's 
cause. 

It was at the moment w^hen every expedient had been exhausted 
by Norfolk and his fellow-ministers that Cromwell came again to 
the front. Despair of other means drove Henry at last to adopt 
the bold plan from which he had shrunk at Wolsey's fall. The 
plan was simply that the King should disavow the Papal jurisdic- 
tion, declare himself Head of the Church within his realm, and ob- 
tain a divorce from his own ecclesiastical courts. But with Crom- 
well the divorce was but the prelude to a series of changes he was 



344 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



bent upon accomplishing. In all the checkered life of the new min- 
ister what had left its deepest stamp on him was Italy. Not only 
in the rapidity and ruthlessness of his designs, but in their larger 
scope, their clearer purpose, and their admirable combination, the 
Italian state-craft entered with Cromwell into English politics. He 
is, in fact, the first English minister in whom we can trace through 
the whole period of his rule the steady working-out of a great and 
definite purpose. His purpose was to raise the King to absolute 
authority on the ruins of every rival power within the realm. It 
was not that Cromwell was a mere slave of tyranny. Whether we 
may trust the tale that carries him in his youth to Florence or not, 
his statesmanship was closely modeled on the ideal of the Floren- 
tine thinker whose book was constantly in his band. Even as a 
servant of Wolsey he startled the future cardinal, Reginald Pole, 
by bidding him take for his manual in politics the " Prince" of Ma- 
chiavelli. Machiavelli hoped to find in Csesar Borgia, or in the 
later Lorenzo de' Medici, a tyrant who after crushing all rival tyr- 
annies might unite and regenerate Italy ; and it is possible to see in 
the policy of Cromwell the aim of securing enliglitenment and order 
for England by the concentration of all authority in the Crown. 
The one check on this royal absolutism which had survived the 
Wars of the Roses lay in the wealth, the independent synods and 
jurisdiction, and the religious claims of the Church. To reduce the 
great ecclesiastical body to a mere department of the state, in wliich 
all authority should flow from the sovereign alone, and in which 
his will should be the only law, his decision the only test of truth, 
was a change hardly to be wrought without a struggle ; and it was 
the opportunity for such a struggle that Cromwell sav/ in the di- 
vorce. His first blow was decisive. He had saved Wolsey from the 
charge of treason, but he now suffered him to fall under the penal- 
ties of Prasmunire for his exercise of Papal jurisdiction, as legate, 
within the land. The whole nation was declared to have been 
formally involved in the same charge by its acceptance of his au- 
thority, but the legal absurdity was redressed by a general pardon. 
From this pardon the clergy alone found themselves omitted. They 
were told that forgiveness could be bought at no less a price than 
the payment of a fine amounting to a milHon of our present money, 
and the acknowledgment of the King as "Protector and only su- 
preme Head of the Church and Clergy of England." To the first 
demand they at once submitted ; against the second they struggled 
hard, but their appeals to Henry and to Cromwell met only with 
demands for instant obedience. The words were at last submitted 
by Warham to the convocation. There was a general silence. 
" Whoever is silent seems to consent," said the Archbishop. " Then 
are we all silent," replied a voice from among the crowd, and the 
assent was accepted. To every mind but Cromwell's the words 
seemed but a menace to the Pope, a threat which was backed by 
the demand for a settlement of the question addressed to Clement 
on the part of the House of Lords. "The cause of his Majesty," 
the Peers were made to say, " is the cause of each of ourselves." 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



345 



If Clement would not confirm what was described as the judgment 
of the universities, " our condition will not be wholly irremediable. 
Extreme remedies are ever harsh of application, but he that is sick 
will by all means be rid of his distemper." The expulsion of Cath- 
erine from the King's palace gave emphasis to the demand. But 
Cromwell still kept his hand on the troubled churchmen. Con- 
vocation was made to propose the withdrawal of the payment of 
first-fruits to Rome on the promotion of bishops, and to petition 
that, should the Papacy resent such a step by a refusal to recognize 
the prelates who declined to pay them, then, "may it please your 
Highness to ordain in this present Parliament that the obedience 
of your Highness and of the people be withdrawn from the See 
of Rome." A bill to this effect was passed, but with a provision 
which suspended it as a menace over the Pope's head at the discre- 
tion of the Crown. Menaces, however, fell unheeded on the Roman 
Court. While still suggesting a compromise as to the main point 
at issue, Clement boldly rebuked Henry for the indelicacy of his 
relations with Anne Boleyn, who had taken her rival's place in the 
King's palace ; and ordered him to restore Catherine, till the cause 
was tried, to her lawful position as Queen. By a brief which was 
posted on the church-doors in Flanders, he inhibited him, on pain 
of excommunication, from seeking a divoi'ce in his own English 
courts, or from contracting a new marriage. Henry replied, not 
merely by a secret union with Anne Boleyn, but by the Statute of 
Appeals, which forbade all further processes in the Court of Rome, 
and annihilated, as far as his English subjects Avere concerned, the 
judicial jurisdiction of the Papacy. Cranmer, an active partisan of 
the divorce, was named, on Warham's death, to the see of Canter- 
bury; proceedings were at once commenced in his court; and the 
marriage of Catherine was formally declared invalid b}'" the new 
Primate at Dunstable. A week later Cranmer set on the brow of 
Anne Boleyn the crown which she had so long coveted. 

As yet the real character of Cromwell's ecclesiastical policy had 
been disguised by its connection with the divorce. But though 
formal negotiations continued between England and Rome, until 
Clement's final decision in Catherine's favor, they had no longer 
any influence on the series of measures which in their rapid suc- 
cession changed the whole character of the English Church. The 
acknowledgment of Henry's title as its protector and head was 
soon found by the clergy to have been more than a form of words. 
It was the first step in a policy by which the Church was to be 
prostrated at the foot of the throne. Convocation was forced to 
recognize the necessity of the royal permission and assent for the 
validity of its proceedings and decisions. A new act turned the 
bishops into mere nominees of the King. Their election by the 
chapters of their cathedral churches had long become formal, and 
their appointment had since the time of the Edwards been practi- 
cally made by the Papacy on the nomination of the Crown. The 
privilege of fi"ee election was now with bitter irony left to the 
chapters, but they were compelled to receive the candidate chosen 



346 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



by the King on pain of praemunire. This strange expedient has 
lasted till the present time; but its character has wholly changed 
since the restoration of constitutional rule. The nomination of 
bishops has ever since the accession of the Georges passed from 
the King in person to the minister who represents the will of the 
people. Practically, therefore, an English prelate, alone among 
all the prelates of the world, is now raised to his episcopal throne 
by the same popular election which raised Ambrose to his episco- 
pal chair at Milan. But at the moment, Cromwell's measure re- 
duced the English bishops to absolute dependence on the Crown. 
Their dependence would have been complete had his policy been 
thoroughly carried out, and the royal power of deposition put in 
force as well as that of appointment. As it was, Henry could warn 
the Archbishop of Dublin that if he persevered in his "proud folly, 
we be able to remove you again and to put another man of more 
virtue and honesty in your 2:)lace." Even Ehzabeth in a burst of ill- 
humor threatened to " unfrock" the Bishop of Ely. By Cromwell's 
more ardent partisans this dependence of the bishops on the Crown 
was fully recognized. On the death of Henry the Eighth, Cran- 
mer took out a new commission from Edward for the exercise of his 
office. Latimer, when the royal policy clashed with his belief, felt 
bound to resign the see of Worcester. That the power of deposi- 
tion was at a later time quietly abandoned was due not so much to 
any deference for the religious instincts of the nation, but to the 
fact that the steady servility of the bishops rendered it absolutely 
unnecessary. When convocation was once silenced, and the bish- 
ops fairly at Henry's feet, the ground was cleared for the great 
statute by which the new character of the Church was defined.. 
The Act of Supremacy ordered that the King " shall be taken, ac- 
cepted, and reputed the only supreme Head in earth of the Churcli 
of England, and shall have and enjoy annexed and united to the 
Imperial Crown of this realm as well the title and style thereof as. 
all the honors, jurisdictions, authorities, immunities, profits, and 
commodities to the said dignity belonging, with full power to visit, 
repress, redress, reform, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, 
contempts, and enormities, which by any manner of spiritual au- 
thority or jurisdiction might or may lawfully be reformed." Au- 
thority in all matters ecclesiastical, as well as civil, was vested 
solely in the Crown. The " courts spiritual" became as thorough- 
ly the King's courts as the temporal courts at Westminster. Con- 
vocation could only deliberate by the royal license, and its decisions 
were of no validity without the royal assent. It was the Crown 
alone which could legally repress error or redress spiritual abuses. 
But the full meaning which Cromwell attached to the supremacy 
was seen on his elevation to the new post of vicar-general or vice- 
gerent of the King in all matters ecclesiastical. His first act was 
to seize into the hands of the Crown the one means of speaking to 
the people at large which existed at that time._ With the instinct 
of genius he discerned the part which the pulpit was to play in the 
religious and political struggle which was at hand, and he resolved 



VL] 



TRE NEW MONARCHY. 



347 



to turn it to the profit of the monarchy. The clergy learned by in- 
junction after injunction that they were regarded, and must learn 
to regard themselves, as mere mouth-pieces of the royal will. The 
restriction of the right of preaching to priests who received licenses 
from the Crown silenced every voice of opposition. Even to those 
who received these licenses theological controversy was forbidden. 
The process of "tuning the pulpits" made them at every crisis the 
means of diffusing the royal will. At the moment of Henry's last 
quarrel with Rome every bishop, abbot, and parish priest was re- 
quired to preach against the usurjDations of the Papacy and to pro- 
claim the King as the Supreme Head of the Church. The very 
heads of the sermon were prescribed ; and the bishops were held 
responsible for the compliance of the clei-gy with these orders, as 
the sheriffs were held responsible for the compliance of the bishops. 
It Avas only when all possibility of resistance was at an end, when 
the Church was gagged and its pulpits turned into mere echoes 
of Henry's will, that Cromwell ventured on his last and crowning- 
change, that of claiming for the Crown the right of dictating at 
its pleasure the form of faith and doctrine to be held and taught 
throughout the land. A purified Catholicism such as Erasmus and 
Colet had dreamed of was now to be the religion of England. 
But the dream of the New Learning was to be wrought out, not by 
the progress of education and piety, but by the brute force of the 
new monarchy. The Articles of Religion, which convocation re- 
ceived and adopted without venturing on a protest, were drawn up 
by the hand of Henry himself. The Bible and the three Creeds 
were laid down as the sole grounds of faith. The sacraments were 
reduced from seven to three, only penance being allowed to rank 
on an equality with baptism and the Lord's Supper. The assertion 
of the doctrines of transubstantiation and confession was compen- 
sated by the acknowledgment of justification by faith, a doctrine 
for which the friends of the New Learning, such as Pole and Con- 
tarini, were struggling at Rome itself. The spirit of Erasmus was 
seen in the condemnation of purgatory, of pardons, and of masses 
for the dead, in the admission of prayers for the dead, and in the 
retention of the ceremonies of the Church without material change. 
Enormous as was the doctrinal revolution, not a murmur broke the 
assent of convocation, and the articles were sent by the vicar-gen- 
eral into every county to be obeyed at men's peril. The plans of 
the New Learning were carried steadily out in the series of royal 
injunctions which followed. Pilgrimages M'ere suppressed ; the ex- 
cessive number of holy days diminished; the worship of images and 
relics discouraged in words which seem almost copied from the pro- 
test of Erasmus. His burning appeal for a translation of the Bible 
which weavers might repeat at their shuttle, and plowmen sing at 
their plow, received at last a reply. The Bible was formally adopt- 
ed as the basis of English faith. As a preliminary measure the Creed, 
the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments were at once trans- 
lated into English, and ordered to be taught by every school-master 
and father of a family to his children or pupils. In the outset of 



348 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH FEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the ministry of Norfolk and More, the King had promised a new 
version of the Scriptures, but the work lagged for five years in the 
hands of the bishops till Miles Coverdale, a friend of Cranmer, was 
employed to collect and revise the translations of Tyndale, and the . 
Bible which he edited appeared under the avowed patronage of ' 
Henry himself. The story of the supremacy was graven on its 
very title-page. The new foundation of religious truth was to be 
regai'ded throughout England as a gift, not from the Church, but 
from the King. It is Henry on his throne who gives the sacred 
volume to Cranmer, ere Cranmer and Cromwell can distribute it to 
the throng of priests and laymen below. 

The temper of the New Learning was seen yet more clearly in 
Cromwell's attitude toward the monastic orders. In the early days 
of Erasmus popes and bishops had joined with princes and scholars 
in welcoming the diffusion of culture and the hopes of religious re- 
form. But though an abbot or a prior here or there might be found 
among the supporters of the movement, the monastic orders, as a 
whole, repelled it with unswerving obstinacy. The quarrel only be- 
came more bitter as years went on. The keen sarcasms of Erasmus, 
the insolent buffoonery of Hutten, were lavished on the "lovers of 
darkness" and of the cloister. In England Colet and More echoed 
with greater reserve the scorn and invective of their friends. As 
an outlet for religious enthusiasm, indeed, monasticism was practi- 
cally dead. The friar, now that his fervor of devotion and his in- 
tellectual energy had passed away, had sunk into the mere beggar. 
The monks had become mere land-owners. Most of their houses 
were anxious only to enlarge their revenues and to diminish the 
number of those who shared them. In the general carelessness 
which prevailed as to the religious objects of their trust, in the 
wasteful management of their estates, in the indolence and self-in- 
dulgence which for the most part characterized them, the monas- 
tic houses simply exhibited the faults of all corporate bodies that 
have outlived the Avork which they were created to perform. But 
they were no more unpopular than such corporate bodies generally 
are. The Lollard cry for their suppression had died away. In the 
North, where some of the greatest abbeys were situated, the monks 
were on good terms with the country gentry, and their houses served 
as schools for their children ; nor is there any sign of a different 
feeling elsewhere. But in Cromwell's system there was no room 
for either the virtues or the vices of monasticism, for its indolence 
and superstition, or for its independence both of the episcopate and 
the throne. While the changes we have narrated were going on, 
two royal commissioners, Legh and Leyton, had been dispatched on 
a general visitation of the religious houses, and their reports form- 
ed a "Black Book" which was laid before Parliament on their re- 
turn. It was acknowledged that about a third of the religious 
houses, including the bulk of the larger abbeys, were fairly and de- 
cently conducted. The rest were charged with drunkenness, with 
simony, and with the foulest and most revolting crimes. The char- 
acter of the visitors, the sweeping nature of their report, and the 



VI.] 



TRE NEW MONARCHY. 



349 



long debate which followed on its reception, leave little doubt that 
the charges were grossly exaggerated, but there is no ground for 
believing them to have been wholly untrue. The want of any ef- 
fective discipline, which had resulted from their exemption from 
any but Papal supervision, told fatally against monastic morality, 
even in abbeys like St. Albans ; and the acknowledgment of War- 
ham, as well as the partial measure of suppression begun by Wol- 
sey, goes far to prove that in the smaller houses, at least, indolence 
had passed into crime. But in spite of the ciy of "Down with 
them" which broke from the Commons as the report Avas read, the 
country was still far from desiring the utter downfall of the mo- 
nastic system. A long and bitter debate was followed by a com- 
promise which suppressed all houses whose income fell below £200 
a year, and granted their revenues to the Crown ; but the great ab- 
beys were still preserved intact. 

The debate on the suppression of the monasteries was the first 
instance of opposition with which Cromwell had met, and for some 
time longer it was to remain the only one. While the great rev- 
olution which struck down the Church was in progress, England 
simply held her breath. It is only through the stray depositions 
of royal spies that we catch a glimpse of the wrath and hate which 
lay seething under this terrible silence of a Avhole people. For the 
silence was a silence of terror. Before Cromwell's rise and after 
his fall from power the reign of Henry the Eighth witnessed no 
more than the common tyranny and bloodshed of the time. But 
the years of Cromwell's administration form the one period in our 
history which deserves the name which men have given to the rule 
of Robespierre. It was the English Terror. It was by terror that 
Cromwell mastered the King ; it was by terror that he mastered the 
people. Cranraer could plead for him at a later time with Henry 
as "one whose surety was only by your Majesty, who loved your 
Majesty, as I ever thought, no less than God." But the attitude of 
Cromwell toward the King was something more than that of abso- 
lute dependence and unquestioning devotion. He was " so vigilant 
to preserve your Majesty from all treasons," adds the Primate, "that 
few could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same from 
the beginning." Henry, like every Tudor, was fearless of open dan- 
ger, but tremulously sensitive to the lightest breath of hidden dis- 
loyalty. It was on this inner dread that Cromwell based the fabric 
of his power. He was hardly secretary before a host of spies were 
scattered broadcast over the land. Thousands of secret denuncia- 
tions poured into the open ear of the minister. The air was soon 
thick with tales of plots and conspiracies, and with the detection 
and suppression of each Cromwell tightened his hold on the King. 
With Henry to back him he could strike boldly at England itself. 
The same terror which had mastered the King was employed to 
master the people. Men felt in England — to use the figure by which 
Erasmus paints the time — " as if a scorpion lay sleeping under ev- 
ery stone." The confessional had no secrets for Cromwell. Men's 
talk with their closest friends found its way to his ear. " Words 



350 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



idly spoken," the murmurs of a petulant abbot, the ravings of a 
moon-struck nun, were, as the nobles cried passionately at his fall, 
" toi'tured into treason." The only chance of safety lay in silence. 
"Friends who used to write and send me presents," Erasmus tells 
us, " now send neither letter nor gifts, nor receive any from any one, 
and this through fear." But even the refuge of silence was closed 
by a law more infamous than any that has ever blotted the Stat- 
ute-book of England. Not only was thought made treason, but 
men were forced to reveal their thoughts on pain of their very si- 
lence being punished with the penalties of treason. All trust in the 
older bulwarks of liberty was destroyed by a policy as daring as it 
was unscrupulous. The noblest institutions were degraded into in- 
struments of terror. Though Wolsey had strained the law to the 
utmost, he had made no open attack on the freedom of justice. If 
he had shrunk from assembling Parliaments, it was from his sense 
that they were the bulwarks of liberty. Under Cromwell the co- 
ercion of juries and the management of judges rendered justice the 
mere mouthpiece of the royal will : and where even this shadow of 
justice proved an obstacle to bloodshed. Parliament Avas brought 
into play to pass bill after bill of attainder. "He shall be judged 
by the bloody laws he has himself made," was the cry of the Coun- 
cil at the moment of his fall, and by a singular retribution the 
crowning injustice which he sought to introduce even into the prac- 
tice of attainder, the condemnation of a man without hearing his 
defense, was only practiced on himself. But ruthless as was the 
Terror of Cromwell, it was of a nobler type than, the Terror of 
France. He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or stooped to 
the meaner victims of the guillotine. His blows were effective just 
because he chose his victims from among the noblest and the best. 
If he struck at the Church, it Avas through the Carthusians, the ho- 
liest and the most renowned of English churchmen. If he struck 
at the baronage, it was through Lady Salisbury, in whose veins 
flowed the blood of kings. If he struck at the JSTew Learning, it 
was through the murder of Sir Thomas More. But no personal 
vindictiveness mingled with his crime. In temper indeed, so far as 
we can judge from the few stories which lingered among his friends, 
he was a generous, kindly-hearted man, with pleasant and winning 
manners, which atoned for a certain awkwardness of person, and 
with a constancy of friendship which won him a host of devoted 
adherents. But no touch either of love or hate swayed him from 
his course. The student of Machiavelli had not studied the " Prince" 
in vain. He had reduced bloodshed to a system. Fragments of 
his papers still show us with what a business-like brevity he tick- 
ed off human lives among the casual " remembrances" of the day. 
" Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent down to be tried and exe- 
cuted at Reading." "Item, to know the King's pleasure touching 
Master More." " Item, Avhen Master Fisher shall go to his execu- 
tion, and the other." It is indeed this utter absence of all passion, 
of all personal feeling, that makes the figure of Cromwell the most 
terrible in our historv. He has an absolute faith in the end he i? 



VL] 



THE NEW MONABCHY. 



351 



pursuing, and he simply hews his way to it as a Avooclman hews his 
way through the forest — axe in hand. 

The choice of his first victim showed the ruthless precision v/ith 
which Cromwell was to strike. In the general opinion of Europe, 
the foremost Englishman of his time was Sir Thomas More. As 
the policy of the divorce ended in an open rupture with Rome, he 
had withdrawn silently from the ministry ; but his silent disajDprov- 
al was more telling than the opposition of obscurer foes. To Crom- 
well there must have been something specially galling in More's at- 
titude of reserve. The religious reforms of the New Learning were 
being rapidly carried out, but it was plain that the man who rej)re- 
sented the very life of the New Learning believed that the sacrifice 
of liberty and justice was too dear a price to pay even for religious 
reform. More was believed to regard the divorce and re-marriage 
as religiously invalid, though his faith in the power of Parliament 
to regulate the succession made him regard the children of Anne 
Boleyn as the legal heirs of the crown. Cromwell's ingenuity 
framed an act of succession which not only sanctioned the re-mar- 
riage, but called on all who took the oath of allegiance to declare 
their belief in the religious validity of the divorce. The act was 
no sooner passed than a royal mandate bade More repair to Lam- 
beth, to the house where he had bandied fun with Warhani and 
Erasmus, or bent over the easel of Holbein. The summons was, as 
he knew, simply a summons to death, and for a moment there may 
have been soaie passing impulse to yield. But it w^as soon over. 
"I thank the Lord," More said, with a sudden start, as the boat 
dropped silently down the river from his garden steps at Chelsea 
in the eai-ly morning; "I thank the Lord that the field is won." 
Cranmer and his fellow -commissioners tendered to him the new 
oath of allegiance ; but, as they had expected, it was refused. They 
bade him walk in the garden that he might reconsider his reply. 
The day was hot, and More seated himself in a window from which 
he could look down into the crowded court. Even in the presence 
of death, the strange sympathy of his nature could enjoy the humor 
and life of the throng below. "I saw," he said afterward, "Master 
Latimer very merry in the court, for he laughed and took one or 
twain by the neck so handsomely that, if they had been women, I 
should have weened that he waxed wanton." The crowd below was 
chiefly of priests, rectors, and vicars, pressing to take the oath that 
More found harder than death. He bore them no grudge for it. 
When he heard the voice of one who was known to have boggled 
hard at the oath a little while before calling loudly and ostenta- 
tiously for drink, he only noted him with his peculiar humor. " He 
drank," More supposed, " either from dryness or from gladness," or 
" quod ille notus erat Pontifici." He was called in again at last, 
but only repeated his refusal. It was in vain that Cranmer plied 
him with distinctions which perplexed even the subtle wit of the 
ex-chancellor; he remained unshaken, and passed to the Tower. 
For the moment even Cromwell shrank from his blood. More re- 
mained a prisoner, while new victims were chosen to overawe the 



352 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



silent but widely spread opposition to the Bill of Supremacy. In the 
general relaxation of the religious life the charity and devotion of the 
brethren of the Charter-house had won the reverence even of those 
who condemned monasticism. After a stubborn resistance, they had 
acknowledged the royal supremacy, and taken the oath of submis- 
sion prescribed by the act. But by an infamous construction of the 
statute which made the denial of the supremacy treason, the refusal 
of satisfactory answers to official questions as to a conscientious be- 
lief in it was held to be equivalent to open denial. The aim of the 
new measure was well known, and the brethren prejsared to die. In 
the agony of waiting, enthusiasm brought its imaginative consola- 
tions ; " when the host was lifted up there came as it were a whis- 
per of air which breathed upon our faces as we knelt; and there 
came a sweet, soft sound of music." They had not long, however, 
to wait. Their refusal to answer was the signal for their doom. 
Seven swung from the gallows ; the rest were flung into Newgate, 
chained to posts in a noisome dungeon, where, " tied and not able 
to stir," they were left to perish of jail-fever and starvation. In a 
fortnight five were dead, and the rest at the point of death, " almost 
dispatched," Cromwell's envoy wrote to him, " by the hand of God, 
of which, considering their behavior, I am not sorry." The interval 
of im]3risonment had failed to break the resolution of More, and the 
same means sufiiced to bring him to the block. A mock trial was 
hardly necessary for his condemnation, or for that of Fisher, the 
most learned among the prelates who had favored the New Learn- 
ing, and who had been imprisoned on the same charge in the Tow- 
er. The old Bishop approached the block with a book of the New 
Testament in his hand. He opened it at a venture ere he knelt, and* 
read, " This is life eternal to know Thee, the only true God." Fish- 
er's death was soon followed by that of More. On the eve of the 
fatal blow he moved his beard carefully from the block, " Pity 
that should be cut," he was heard to mutter with a touch of the old 
sad irony, " that has never committed treason." 

But it required, as Cromwell well knew, heavier blows even than 
these to break the stubborn resistance of Englishmen to his proj- 
ects of change, and he seized his opportunity in the revolt of the 
North. In the North the monks had been popular; and the out- 
rages with which the dissolution of the smaller abbeys had been 
accompanied had stirred the blood of the nobles, who were already 
writhing beneath the rule of one whom they looked upon as a low- 
born upstart. " The world will never mend," Lord Hussey was 
heard to say, "till we fight for it." Agrarian discontent and the 
love of the old ajeligion united in a revolt which broke out in Lin- 
colnshire. The rising was hardly suppressed when Yorkshire was 
in arms. Fx-om every parish the farmers marched, with the parish 
priest at their head, upon York, and the surrender of the city deter- 
mined the waverers. In a few days Skipton Castle, whei'e the Earl 
of Cumberland held out with a handful of servants, was the only 
spot north of the Humber which remained true to the King. Dur- 
ham rose at the call of Lords Latimer and Westmoreland. Though 



VI-3 



TEE NEW MONABCRT. 



853 



the Earl of ISTorthumberland feigned sickness, the Percies joined the 
revolt. Lord Dacre, the chief of the Yorkshire nobles, surrendered 
Pomfret, and was at once acknowledged as their chief by the insur- 
o-ents. The whole nobility of the North were now in arms, and thir- 
ty thousand " tall men and well horsed" moved on the Don de- 
manding the reversal of the royal policy, a reunion with Rome, the 
restoration of Catherine's daughter, Mary, to her rights as heiress of 
the crown, redress for the wrongs done to the Church, and, above 
all, the fall of Cromwell. Though their advance was checked by 
negotiation, the organization of the revolt went steadily on through- 
out the winter, and a Parliament of the North gathered at Pom- 
fret, and formally adopted the demands of the insurgents. Only 
six thousand men under Norfolk barred their way southward, and 
the Midland counties were known to be disaffected. Cromwell, 
however, remained undaunted by the peril. He suffered Norfolk 
to negotiate; and allowed Henry, under pressure fi'om his Council, 
to promise pardon and a free Parliament at York — a pledge which 
Norfolk and Dacre alike construed into an acceptance of the demands 
made by the insurgents. Their leaders at once flung aside the 
badge of the Five Wounds which they had worn, with a cry "We 
will wear no badge but that of our lord the King," and nobles and 
farmers dispersed to their homes in triumph. But the towns of the 
North were no sooner garrisoned, and Norfolk's army in the heart 
of Yorkshire, than the veil was flung aside. A few isolated out- 
breaks gave a pretext for the withdrawal of every concession. The 
arrest of the leaders of the " Pilgrimage of Grace," as the insurrec- 
tion was styled, was followed by ruthless severities. The country 
was covered with gibbets. Whole districts were given up to mili- 
t{7 y execution. But it was on the nobles that Cromwell's hand 
fell heaviest. It was only in the North and in the West that any of 
the old feudal force lingered among them, and he seized his oppor- 
tunity for dealing at it a last and fatal blow. " Cromwell," Darcy 
broke fiercely out, as he stood at the Council-board, " it is thou that 
art the very special and chief cause of all this rebellion and wick- 
edness, and dost daily travail to bring us to our ends and strike 
off our heads. I trust that ere thou die, though thou wouldst pro- 
cure all the noblest heads within the realm to be stricken off, yet 
there shall one head remain that shall strike off thy head," But the 
warning was unheeded. Lord Darcy, who stood at the head of the 
nobles of Yorkshire, and Lord Hussey, who stood at the head of the 
nobles of Lincolnshire, went alike to the block. The abbot of Bar- 
lings, who had ridden into Lincoln with his canons in full armor, 
swung with his brother abbot of Kirkstead from the gallows. The 
abbots of Fountains and of Jervaulx were hanged at Tyburn side 
by side with the representative of the great line of Percy. Lady 
Bulmer was burned at the stake. Sir Robert Constable was hang- 
ed in chains before the gate of Hull. The blow to the North had 
hardly been dealt, when Cromwell turned to deal with the West, 
the one other quarter where feudalism still retained its vigor. The 
two houses of the Courtenays and the Poles, linked to each other by 

23 



35J: 



EISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. VI. 

TUO.MAS 

Ckomwell. 
1530- 
1640. 



1538. 



close intermarriages, stood first in descent among the English nobles. 
Margaret Plantagenet, the Countess of Salisbury, a daughter of the 
Duke of Clarence by the heiress of the Earl of Warwick, was at 
once representative of the Nevilles, and a niece of Edward the 
Fourth. Her third son, Reginald Pole, after refusing the highest 
offers from Henry as the price of his approval of the divorce, had 
taken refuge in Rome, where he had been raised to the cardinalate. 
He was now preparing an attack on the King in his book, " On 
the Unity of the Church." " There may be found ways enough in 
Italy," Cromwell wrote to him in significant words, " to rid a treach- 
erous subject. When Justice can take no peace by process of law 
at home, sometimes she may be enforced to take new means abroad." 
But he had left hostages in Henry's hands. " Pity that the folly of 
one witless fool should be the ruin of so great a family. Let him 
follow ambition as fast as he can, these that little have offended 
(saving that he is of their kin) were it not for the great mercy and. 
benignity of the prince, should and m.ight feel what it is to have 
such a traitor to their kinsman." Pole answered by the publica- 
tion of his book, and by an appeal to the Emperor to execute the 
bull of deposition which was now launched by the Papacy. Crom- 
well was quick with his reply. Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter, 
was a kinsman of the Poles, and like them of royal blood, a grand- 
son through his mother of Edward the Fourth. His influence over 
the West was second only to the hold which the Duke .of Norfolk 
had upon the Eastern counties. His discontent at Cromwell's sys- 
tem broke out in words of defiance. "Knaves iiile about the 
King," Exeter is reported to have said; "I trust to give them a 
buffet one day." He was at once arrested with Lord Montague; 
Pole's elder brother, as accomplices of the Cardinal, and both were 
beheaded on Tower Hill. After a brief interval, the gray hairs of 
Lady Salisbury lay dappled with blood upon the same fatal block. 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



355 



CHAPTER VII. 

TEE BEFOBMATIOK 

Section I.— The Protestants. 1540—1553. 

[Authorities. — The main authority for the History of the early Protestants, as of 
the Marian persecution, is Foxe's "Book of Martyrs." In spite of endless errors, 
of Puritan prejudices and deliberate suppressions of the truth (many of which will 
be found corrected by Dr. Maitland's "Essays on the Reformation") its mass of 
facts and wonderful .charm of style will always give a great importance to the work 
of Foxe. The whole story of the early Protestants has been admirably wrought up by 
Mr. Froude (" History of England," chap. vi.). For the close of Henry's reign and 
for that of Edward, we have a mass of material in Strype's "Memorials," and his 
"Life of Cranmer," in Mr. Pocock's edition of "Burnet's Histoiy of the Reforma- 
tion," in Hayward's Life of Edward, and Edward's own Journal, in Holinshed's 
"Chronicle," and Machyn's "Diary" (Camden Society), which continues through the 
reign of Mary. Much light has been thrown from the unpubli^ied State Papers on 
this period by Mr. Froude ("History of England," vols. iv. and v.), whose work aft- 
er the death of Henry the Eighth becomes of greater historic value.] 



"With the death of Lord Exeter and Lady Salisbury the new 
monarchy reached the height of its power. The old English liber- 
ties lay prostrate at the feet of the King. The lords were power- 
less, the House of Commons filled with the creatures of the Court, 
and degraded into the mere engine of tyranny. Royal proclama- 
tions were taking the place of Parliamentary legislation, benevolences 
were encroaching more and more on the right of Parliamentary 
taxation, justice was prostituted in the ordinary courts to the royal 
will, while the boundless and arbitrary powers of the Royal Council 
were gradually superseding the slower processes of the common 
law. The new religious changes had thrown an almost sacred 
character over the " majesty" of the King. Henry was the Head of 
the Church. From the primate to the meanest deacon every min- 
ister of it derived from him his sole right to exercise spiritual 
powers. The voice of its preachers was the mere echo of his will. 
He alone could define orthodoxy or declare heresy. The forms of 
its worship and belief were changed and rechanged at the royal 
caprice. Half of its wealth went to swell the royal treasury, and 
the other half lay at the King's mercy. It was this unprecedented 
concentration of all power in the hands of a single man that over- 
awed the imagination of Henry's subjects. He was regarded as 
something high above the laws which govern common men. The 
voices of statesmen and of priest extolled his wisdom and power as 
more than human. The Parliament itself rose and bowed to the va 
cant throne when his name was mentioned. An absolute devotion 



356 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



to liis person replaced the old loyalty to the law. When the Pri- 
mate of the English Church described the chief merit of Cromwell, 
it was by asserting that he loved the King " no less than lie loved 
God." 

It was indeed Cromwell, as Ave have seen, Avho, more than any 
man, had reared this fabric of king-worship ; but he had hardly 
reared it before it began to give way. In three cardinal points the 
success of his measures brought about the ruin of his policy. One 
of its most striking features had been his revival of parliaments. 
The great assembly which the new monarchy, from Edward the 
Fourth to Wolsey, had dreaded and silenced, was boldly called to the 
front again by Cromwell, and turned into the most formidable weap- 
on of the royal will. The suppression of the mitred abbots, and a 
large creation of new peerages in favor of court favorites and de- 
pendents, left the House of Lords yet more helpless against the 
Crown than of old. The House of Commons was crowded with 
members nominated by the Royal Council. With such houses 
Cromwell had no diihculty in making the nation itself, whether it 
would or not, an accomplice in the work of absolutism. It was by 
Parliamentary statutes that the Church was destroyed, and freedom 
gagged Avith we^ treasons and oaths and questionings. It was by 
bills of attainder promoted in Parliament that the great nobles were 
brought to the block. But the success of such a system depended 
wholly on the absolute servility of Parliament to the will of the 
Crown. On one occasion during Cromwell's own rule a " great de- 
bate" had shown that elements of i-esistance still survived, elements 
which we shall see developing rapidly as the terror passes away, 
and as the power of the Crown declines under the minority of Ed- 
ward and the unpopularity of Mary. As in the modern instance 
of Hungary, the part which the Pai'liament was to play in the pe- 
riod which followed Cromwell's fall shows the importance of cling- 
ing to the forms of constitutional freedom, even when their life 
seems lost. In the inevitable reaction against tyranny they afford 
centres for the reviving energies of the people. It is of hardly 
less importance that the tide of liberty, when it again returns, is 
enabled through their preservation to flow quietly and naturally 
along its traditional channels. And to this revival of a spirit of 
independence Henry largely contributed in the spoliation of the 
Church and the dissolution of the monasteries. Partly from neces- 
sity, partly from a desire to create a large party interested in the 
maintenance of their ecclesiastical policy, Cromwell and the King 
squandered the vast mass of wealth which flowed into the treasury 
with reckless prodigality. Something like a fifth of the actual land 
in the kingdom was in this way transferred from the holding of the 
Church to that of nobles and gentry. Not only Avere tlie older 
houses enriched, but a new aristocracy was erected from among the 
dependents of the Court. The Russels, Cavendishes, and Fitz- 
williams are familiar instances of families which rose from obscuri- 
ty through the enormous grants of Church land made to Henry's 
courtiers. The old baronage was hardly crushed before a new 



VIL] 



THE BEFOEMATIOK 



aristocracy took its place. "Those families within or without the 
bounds of the peerage," observes Mr. Hallam, " who are now deem- 
ed the most considerable, will be found, with no great number of 
exceptions, to have first become conspicuous under the Tudor line 
of kings, and if we could trace the title of their estates, to have ac- 
quired no small portion of them mediately or immediately from mo- 
nastic or other ecclesiastical foundations." The leading part which 
the new peers took in the events Avhich followed Henry's death 
gave a fresh strength and vigor to the whole order. But the 
smaller gentry shared in the general enrichment of the landed pro- 
prietors, and the new energy of the Lords was soon followed by a 
display of fresh political independence among the Commons them- 
selves. 

But it was above all in the new energy which the religious spirit 
of the people at large drew from the ecclesiastical changes which 
he had brought about that the policy of Cromwell was fatal to the 
new monarchy. Lollardism, as a great social and popular move- 
ment, had ceased with the suppression of Cobham's revolt, and lit- 
tle remained of the directly religions impulse given by Wyclif be- 
yond a vague restlessness and discontent with the system of the 
Church. But weak and fitful as was the life of Lollardism, the 
prosecutions whose records lie so profusely scattered over the bish- 
ops' registers failed wholly to kill it. We see groups meeting here 
and there to read " in a great book of heresy all one night certain 
chapters of the evangelists in English," while transcripts of Wyc- 
lif's tracts passed from hand to hand. The smouldering embers 
needed but a breath to fan them into flame, and the breath came 
from William Tyndale. A young scholar from Oxford, he was 
drawn from his retirement in Gloucestershire by the news of Lu- 
ther's protest at Wittenberg, and after a brief stay in London we 
find him on his way to the little town which had suddenly become 
the sacred city of the Keforraation. Students of all nations were 
flocking there with an enthusiasm which resembled that of the Cru- 
sades. "As they came in sight of the town," a contemporary tells 
us, " they returned thanks to God with clasped hands, for from Wit- 
tenberg as heretofore from Jerusalem the light of evangelical 
truth hath spread to the utmost parts of the earth." It was at Lu- 
ther's instance that Tyndale translated there the gospels and epis- 
tles ; and the press which he established at Antwerp, where he was 
joined by a few scholars from Cambridge, was soon busy with his 
A'^ersions of the Scriptures, and with reprints of the tracts of Wyclif 
and of Luther. These Avere smuggled over to England and circula- 
ted among the poorer and trading classes through the agency of an 
association of " Christian Brethren," consisting principally of Lon- 
don tradesmen and citizens, but Avhose missionaries spread over the 
country at large. They found their Avay at once to the universities, 
where the intellectual impulse given by the ISTevY Learning was 
quickening religious speculation. Cambridge had already won a 
name for heresy, and the Cambridge scholars whom Wolsey had in- 
troduced into Cardinal College spread the contagion through Ox- 



358 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



rcHAP. 



ford. Tyuclale himself was an instance of their influence. Tlie group 
of " Brethren" which was formed in Cardinal College for the secret 
reading and discussion of the epistles soon included the more intel- 
ligent and learned scholars of the university. It was in vain that 
Clark, the centre of this group, strove to dissuade fresh members 
from joining it by warnings of the impending dangers. " I fell 
down on my knees at his feet," says one of them, Anthony Dala- 
ber, ^' and with tears and sighs besought him that for the tender 
mercy of God he should not refuse me, saying that I trusted veri- 
ly that He who had begun this on me would not forsake me, but 
would give me grace to continue therein to the end. When ho 
heard me say so he came to me, took me in his arms, and kissed me, 
saying, ' The Lord God Almighty grant you so to do, and from 
lienceforth ever take me for your father, and I will take you for ray 
son in Christ.' " The rapid diffusion of Tyndale's works, and their 
vehement attacks on the bishops and the Church, roused Wolsey at 
last to action. At Oxford the " Brethren" were thrown into prison 
and their books seized ; in London a pile of Testaments was burn- 
ed in St. Paul's Church-yard, and a few heretics recanted before the 
Cardinal in its nave. But in spite of the panic of the Protestants, 
who fled in crowds over-sea, little severity was really exercised ; and 
it was not till Wolsey's fall that forbearance was thrown aside. 

The anxiety both of the Cardinal and the King lest in the out- 
burst against heresy the reformers of the New Learning should suf- 
fer harm, was remarkably shown in the protection they extended to 
one who was destined to eclipse even the fame of Colet as a popu- 
lar preacher. Hugli Latimer was the son of a Leicestershire yeo- 
man, whose armor the boy had buckled on ere he set out to meet 
the Cornish insurgents at Blackheath Field. He has himself de- 
scribed the soldierly training of his youth. "My father was de- 
lighted to teach me to shoot with the bow. He taught me how to 
draw, how to lay my body to the bow ; not to draw with strength 
of arm as other nations do, but w^ith the strength of the body." At 
fourteen he was at Cambridge, flinging himself into the New Learn- 
ing, which was winning its way there with a zeal which at last led 
him to study in Italy itself. The ardor of his mental efforts left 
its mark on him in ailments and enfeebled health, from which, vigor- 
ous as he was, his frame never wholly freed itself. But he was des- 
tined to be known, not as a scholar, but as a preachei*. The sturdy 
good sense of the man shook off the pedantry of the schools as well 
as the subtlety of the theologian in his addresses from the pulpit. 
He had little turn for speculation, and in the religious changes of 
the day we find him constantly lagging behind his brother reform- 
ers. But he had the moral earnestness of a Jewish prophet, and 
his denunciations of wrong had a prophetic directness and fire. 
" Have pity on your soul," he cried to Henry, " and think that the 
day is even at hand when you shall give an account of your of- 
fice, and of the blood that hath been shed by your sword." His 
irony was yet more telling than his invective. " I would ask you a 
strange question," he said once at Paul's Cross to a ring of bishojps, 



VILJ 



TSE BEFOBMATION. 



359 



" who is the most diligent prelate in all England, that passeth all the 
rest in doing of his office ? I will tell you. It is the devil ! of all 
the pack of them that have cure, the devil shall go for my money ; 
for he ordereth his business. Therefore, you unpreaching prelates, 
learn of the devil to be diligent in your office. If you will not 
learn of God, for shame learn of the devil." But he is far from lim- 
iting himself to invective. His homely humor breaks in with story 
and apologue; his earnestness is always tempered with good sense; 
his plain and simple style quickens with a shrewd mother-wit. He 
talks to his hearers as a man talks to his friends, telling stories 
such as we have given of his own life at home, or chatting about the 
changes and chances of the day with a transparent simplicity and 
truth that raise even his chat into grandeur. His theme is always 
the actual world about him, and in his homely lessons of loyalty, of 
industry, of pity for the poor, he touches upon almost every sub- 
ject, from the plow to the throne. No such preaching had been 
heard in England before his day, and with the growth of his fame 
grew the danger of persecution. There were moments when, bold 
as he was, Latimer's heart failed him. " If I had not trust that 
God will help me," he wrote once, " I think the ocean sea would 
liave divided ray lord of London and me by this day." A citation 
for heresy at last brought the danger home. " I intend," he wrote 
with his peculiar medley of humor and pathos, "to make merry 
with my parishioners this Christmas, for all the sorrow, lest per- 
chance I may never return to them again." But he was saved 
throughoiit by the steady protection of the Court. Wolsey upheld 
him against the threats of the Bishop of Ely ;. Henry made him his 
own chaplain ; and the King's interposition at this critical moment 
forced Latimer's judges to content themselves with a few vague 
words of submission. 

Henry's quarrel with Rome soon snatched the Protestants from 
the keener persecution which troubled them after Wolsey's fall. 
The divorce, the renunciation of the Papacy, the degradation of 
the clergy, the suppression of the monasteries, the religious changes, 
fell like a series of heavy blows upon the priesthood. From perse- 
cutors they suddenly sank into men trembling for their very lives. 
Those whom they had threatened were placed at their head. Shax- 
ton, a favorer of the new changes, was raised to the see of Salis- 
bury ; Barlow, a yet more extreme partisan, to that of St. David's. 
Latimer himself became Bishop of Worcester, and in a vehement 
address to the clergy in convocation taunted them with their greed 
and superstition in the past, and with their inactivity when the King 
and his Pai-liament were laboring for the revival of religion. The 
aim of Cromwell, as we have seen, was simply that of the New 
Learning ; he desired religious reform rather than revolution, a sim- 
plification rather than change of 'doctrine, the purification of worship 
rather than the introduction of a new ritual. But it was impossi- 
ble for him to strike blow after blow at the Church \yithout leaning 
instinctively to the party who sympathized with the German refor- 
mation, and were longing for a more radical change at home. The 



360 



ELSTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Protestants, as these were called, appealed to him against the bish- 
ops' courts, and looked for their security to the " rattling letters" 
from the Vicar-General, which damped the zeal of their opponents. 
Few as they still were in numbers, their new hopes made them a 
formidable force ; and in the school of persecution they had learned 
a violence which delighted in outrages on the faith which had so 
long trampled them underfoot. At the very outset of Cromwell's 
changes four Suffolk boys broke into the church at Doverscourt, 
tore down a wonder-working crucifix, and burned it in the fields. 
The suppression of the lesser monasteries was the signal for a new 
outburst of ribald insult to the old religion. The roughness, inso- 
lence, and extortion of the commissioners sent to effect it drove the 
whole monastic body to despair. Their servants rode along the 
road with copes for doublets, and tunicles for saddle-cloths, and 
scattered panic among the larger houses which were left. Some 
sold their jewels and relics to provide for the evil day they saw ap- 
proaching. Some begged of their own will for dissolution. It was 
worse when fresh ordinances of the Vicar-General ordered the re- 
moval of objects of superstitious veneration. The removal, bitter 
enough to those whose religion twined itself around the image or 
the relic which was taken away, was yet more imbittered by the 
insults with which it was accompanied. The miraculous rood at 
Boxley, which bowed its head and stirred its eyes, was paraded 
from market to market and exhibited as a juggle before the Court. 
Images of the Virgin were stripped of their costly vestments and 
sent to bo publicly burned at London. Latimer forwarded to the 
capital the figure of Our Lady, which he had thrust out of his ca- 
thedral church at Worcester, with rough words of scorn : " Sho, 
with her old sister of Walsingham, her younger sister of Ipswich, 
and their two other sisters of Doncaster and Penrice, would make 
a jolly muster at Smithfield." Fresh orders were given to fling 
all relics from their reliquaries, and to level every shrine with the 
ground. The bones of St. Thomas of Canterbury were torn from 
the stately shrine which had been the glory of his metropolitan 
church, and his name erased from the service books as that of a 
traitor. The introduction of the English Bible into churches gave 
a new opening for the zeal of the Protestants. In spite of royal in- 
junctions that it should be read decently and without comment, the 
young zealots of the party prided themselves on shouting it out to 
a circle of excited hearers dui'ing the service of mass, and accom- 
panied their reading with violent expositions. Protestant maidens 
took the new English primer to church with them, and studied it 
ostentatiously during matins. Insult passed into open violence 
when the bishops' courts were invaded and broken up by Protestant 
mobs ; and law and public opinion were outraged at once, when 
priests who favored the new doctrines began openly to bring home 
wives to their vicarages. A fiery outburst of popular discussion 
compensated for the silence of the pulpits. The new Scriptures, in 
Henry's bitter words of complaint, were "disputed, rhymed, sung, 
and jangled in every tavern and ale-house." The articles which 



VII.] 



TRE EEF0BMATI02f. 



361 



dictated the belief of the English Church roused a furious contro- 
versy. Above all, the sacrament of the mass, tlie centre of the 
Catholic system of faith and worship, and which still remained 
sacred to the bulk of Englishmen, was attacked with a scurrility 
and profaneness which pass belief. The doctrine of transubstau- 
tiation, which was as yet recognized by law, was held up to scorn 
in ballads and mystery plays. In one church a Protestant law- 
yer raised a dog in his hands when the priest elevated the host. 
The most sacred words of the old worship, the words of consecra- 
tion, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jug- 
glery, as " Hocus-pocus." It was by this attack on the mass, even 
more than by the other outrages, that the temper both of Henry 
and the nation was stirred to a deep resentment; and the first 
signs of reaction were seen in the Law of the Six Articles, which 
was passed by the Parliament with almost universal assent. On 
the doctrine of transubstantiation, which was reasserted by the 
first of these, there was no difference of feeling or belief between 
the men of the New Learning and the older Catholics. But the 
road to a further installment of even moderate reform seemed 
closed by the five other articles whic'h sanctioned communion in one 
kind, the celibacy of the clergy, monastic vows, private masses, and 
auricular confession. A more terrible featm-e of the reaction was 
the revival of persecution. Burning was denounced as the penalty 
for a denial of transubstantiation ; it was only on a second offense 
that it became the penalty for an infraction of the other five doc- 
trines. A refusal to confess or to attend mass was made felony. 
It was in vain that Cranmer, with the five bishops who partially 
sympathized with the Protestants, struggled against the bill in the 
Lords : the Commons were " all of one opinion," and Henry him- 
self acted as spokesman on the side of the Articles. But zealous as 
he was for order, Henry Avas still true in heart to the cause of a 
moderate reform ; and Cromwell, though he had bent to the storm, 
was quick to profit by the vehemence of the Catholic reaction. In 
London alone five hundred Protestants were indicted under the 
new act. Latimer and Shaxton were impiisoned, and the former 
forced into a resignation of his see. Cranmer himself was only 
saved by Henry's personal favor. But the first burst of triumph 
had no sooner spent itself, than the strong hand of Cromwell was 
again felt by the Catholic zealots. The bishops were quietly re- 
leased. The London indictments were quashed. The magistrates 
were roughly checked in their enforcement of the law, while a gen- 
eral pardon cleared the prisons of the heretics who had been ar- 
rested under its provisions. A few months after its enactment we 
find, from a Protestant letter, that persecution had wholly ceased. 
" The Word is powerfully preached, and books of every kind may 
safely be exposed for sale." 

Never indeed had Cromwell shown such greatness as in his last 
struggle against Fate. " Beknaved" by the King, whose confidence 
in him was hourly waning, and met by a growing opposition in the 
Council as his favor declined, the temper of the man remained in- 



362 



HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



domitable as ever. He stood absolutely alone. Wolsey, hated as 
he had been by the nobles, had been supported by the Church ; but 
churchmen hated Cromwell with an even fiercer hate than the no- 
bles themselves. His only friends were the Protestants, and their 
friendship was more fatal than the hatred of his foes. But he 
showed no signs of fear, or of halting in the course he had entered 
on. His activity was as boundless as ever. Like Wolsey, he had 
concentrated in his hands the whole administration of the state; he 
was at once foreign minister and home minister and vicar-general 
of the Church, the creator of a new fleet, the organizer of armies, 
the president of the terrible Star-Chamber. But his Italian indif- 
ference to the mere show of power contrasted strongly with the 
pomp of the Cardinal. His personal habits were simple and un- 
ostentatious. K he clutched at money, it was to feed the vast army 
of spies whom he maintained at his own expense, and Avhose work 
he surveyed with a sleepless vigilance. More than fifty volumes 
still remain of the gigantic mass of his correspondence. Thousands 
of letters from " poor bedesmen," from outraged wives and wrong- 
ed laborers and persecuted heretics, flowed in to the all-powerful 
minister, whose system of pcrso"nal government had turned him into 
the universal court of appeal. So long as Henry supported him, 
however reluctantly, he was more than a match, even single-hand- 
ed, for his foes. He met the hostility of the nobles with a threat 
which marked his power. "If the Lords would handle him so, he 
would give them such a breakfast as never was made in England, 
and that the proudest of them should know." Pie was strong- 
enough to expel the Bishop of Winchester, Gardiner, who had be- 
come his chief opponent, from the Royal Council. His single will' 
forced on a scheme of foreign policy, whose aim was to bind En- 
gland to the cause of the Reformation, while it bound Henry help- 
lessly to his minister. The daring boast which his enemies laid 
afterward to his charge, whether uttered or not, is but the expres- 
sion of his policy. "In brief time he would bring things to such a 
pass that the King with all his power should not be able to hinder 
him." His plans rested, like the plan which proved fatal to Wolsey, 
on a fresh marriage of his master. The short-lived royalty of Anne 
Boleyn had ended in charges of adultery and treason, and in her 
death on Tower Hill. Her rival and successor in Henry's affec- 
tions, Jane Seymour, had just died in childbirth ; and Cromwell re- 
placed her with a German consort, Anne of Cleves, the sister-in-law 
of the Lutheran elector of Saxony. He dared even to resist Hen- 
ry's caprice when the King revolted, on their first interview, at the 
coarse features and unwieldy form of his new bride. For the mo- 
ment Cromwell had brought matters " to such a pass" that it was 
impossible to recoil from the marriage. But the marriage of Anne 
of Cleves was but the first step in a policy which, had it been car- 
ried out as he designed it, would have anticipated the triumphs of 
Richelieu. Charles and the House of Austria could alone bring 
about a Catholic reaction strong enough to arrest and roll back the 
Reformation ; and Cromwell w^as no sooner united with the princes 



YXL] 



THE EEFOBMATION. 



363 



of North Germany than he sought to league them with France for 
the overthrow of the Emperor. Had he succeeded, the whole face 
of Europe would have been changed ; Southern Germany would 
have been secured for Protestantism, and the Thirty Years' War 
averted. He failed as men fail who stand ahead of their age. The 
German princes shrank from a contest with the Emperor ; France 
from a struggle which would be fatal to Catholicism ; and Henry, 
left alone to bear the resentment of the House of Austria, and 
chained to a wife he loathed, turned savagely on Cromwell. The 
nobles sprang on him with a fierceness that told of their long-hoard- 
ed hate. Taunts and execrations burst from the Lords at the 
council-table, as the Duke of Norfolk, who had been charged with 
the minister's arrest, tore the ensign of the Garter insolently from 
his neck. At the charge of treason Cromwell flung his cap on the 
ground with a passionate cry of despair. " This, then," he exclaim- 
ed, " is my guerdon for the services I have done ! On your con- 
sciences, I ask you, am I a traitor ?" Then, with a sudden sense 
that all was over, he bade his foes " make quick work, and not leave 
me to languish in prison." 

Quick work was made, and a yet louder burst of popular ap- 
plause than that which had hailed the attainder of Cromwell, hailed 
his execution. For the moment his designs seemed to be utterly 
abandoned. The marriage Avith Anne of Cleves was annulled, and a 
new queen found in Catherine Howard, a girl of the House of Nor- 
folk. Norfolk himself, who stood, as before Cromwell's rise, at the 
head of affairs, resumed the policy which Cromwell had interrupted. 
With the older nobles generally, he still clung to the dream of the 
New Learning, to a purification of the Church through a general 
council, and to the reconciliation of England with the purified body 
of Catholicism. For such a purpose it was necessary to vindicate 
English orthodoxy, and to ally England with the Emperor, by whose 
influence alone the assembly of such a council could be Ijrought 
about. Norfolk and his master remained true to the principles of 
the earlier reform. The reading of the Bible was still permitted, 
though its disorderly expositions were put down. The publication 
of an English litany furnished the germ of the national Prayer- 
book of a later time. The greater abbeys, which had been saved 
by the energetic resistance of the Parliament from Cromwell's 
grasp, were now involved in the same ruin with the smaller. There 
was no thought of reviving the old superstitions, or undoing the 
work which had been done, but simply of guarding the purified 
faith against Lutheran heresy. It was for this purpose that the Six 
Articles were once more put in force, and a Committee of State 
named to guard against the progress of heresy ; while the friend- 
ship of England was offered to Chai'les, when the struggle between 
France and the House of Austria burst again for a time into flame. 
But, as Cromwell had foreseen, the time for a peaceful reform, and 
for a general reunion of Christendom, was past. The Council, so 
passionately desired, met at Trent in no spirit of conciliation, but 
to ratify the very superstitions and errors against which the New 



364 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Learning had protested, and which England and Germany had flung 
away. The long hostility of France and the House of Austria 
merged in the greater struggle which was opening between Cathol- 
icism and the Reformation. The Emperor, from whom Norfolk 
looked for a purification of the Church, established the Inquisition 
in Flanders. As their hopes of a middle course faded, the Catho- 
lic nobles themselves drifted unconsciously with the tide of reac- 
tion. The persecution of the Protestants took a new vigor. Anne 
Ascue, a lady of the Court, was tortured and burned for her denial 
of transubstantiation. Latimer was seized ; and Cranmer himself, 
who, in the general dissolution of the moderate party, was drifting 
toward Protestantism as ISTorfolk was drifting toward Rome, was 
for a moment in danger. But at the last hours of his life Henry 
proved himself true to the work he had begun. His resolve not to 
return to the obedience of Rome threw him, w^hether he Avould or 
not, back on the policy of the great minister whom he had hurried 
to the block. He offered to unite in a " League Christian" with the 
German princes. He suddenly consented to the change, suggested 
by Cranmer, of the mass into a communion service. He flung the 
Duke of Norfolk into the Tower as a traitor, sent his son, the Earl 
of Surrey, to the block, and placed the Earl of Hertford, who was 
known as a patron of the Protestants, at the head of the Council 
of Regency which he nominated at his death. 

Catherine Howard atoned, like Anne Boleyn, for her unchastity by 
a traitor's death ; her successor on the throne, Catherine Parr, had 
the luck to outlive the King, But of Henry's numerous marriages 
only three children survived ; Mary and Elizabeth, the daughters of 
Catherine of Arragon and of Anne Boleyn, and Edward, the boy who* 
now ascended the throne as Edward the Sixth, his son by Jane Sey- 
mour. The will of Henry had placed Jane's brothei', whom he had 
raised to the peerage as Lord Hertford, and who at a later time as- 
sumed the title of Duke of Somerset, at the head of a Council of 
Regency, in which the adherents of the old and new systems were 
carefully balanced; but his first act was to expel the former from 
the Council, and to seize the whole royal power, with the title of 
Protector. Hertford's personal weakness forced him at once to 
seek for popular support by measures which marked the first retreat 
of the new monarchy from the position of pure absolutism which 
it had reached under Henry. A fatal statute, which at the close of 
the late reign had given to royal proclamations the force of law, was 
repealed. The new felonies and treasons, which Cromwell had cre- 
ated and used with so terrible an effect, were erased from the Stat- 
ute-book. The hope of support from the Protestants united with 
Hertford's personal predilections in his patronage of the innova- 
tions against which Henry had battled to the last. Cranmer, as we 
have seen, had drifted into a purely Protestant position, and his 
open break with the older system followed quickly on Hertford's 
rise to power. "This year," says a contemporary, "the Archbish- 
op of Canterbury did eat meat openly in Lent in the hall of Lam- 
beth, the like of which was never seen since England was a Christian 



VII.] 



THE BEFOBMATION. 



365 



country." This significant act was followed by a rapid succession 
of sweeping changes. The legal prohibitions of Lollardry were re- 
moved ; the Six Articles were repealed ; a royal injunction removed 
all pictures and images from the churches ; pi'iests were permitted 
to marry ; the new communion which had taken the place of the 
mass was ordered to be administered in both kinds, and in the En- 
glish tongue ; an English Book of Common Prayer, the Liturgy^ 
which with slight alterations is still used in the Church of England, 
replaced the missal and breviary, from which its contents are mainly 
drawn ; a new catechism embodied the doctrines of Cranmer and 
his friends; and a Book of Homilies compiled in the same sense 
was appointed to be read in churches. These sweeping religious 
changes were carried through with the despotism, if not with the 
vigor, of Cromwell. Gardiner, who in his servile accejDtance of the 
personal supremacy of the sovereign denounced all ecclesiastical 
changes made during the King's minority as illegal and invalid, was 
sent to the Tower. The jDOwer of preaching was restricted by the 
issue of licenses only to the friends of the Primate. While all 
counter-arguments were rigidly sujDpressed, a crowd of Protestant 
jDamphleteers flooded the country with vehement invectives against 
the mass and its superstitious accompaniments. The assent of the 
nobles about the Court was won by the suppression of chantries and 
religious guilds, and by glutting their greed with the last spoils of 
the Church. German and Italian mercenaries were introduced to 
stamp out the wider popular discontent which broke out in the East, 
in the West, and in the Midland countitis. The Cornishmen re- 
fused to receive the new service "because it is like a Christmas 
game." Devonshire demanded in open revolt the restoration of the 
mass and the Six Articles. The agrarian discontent woke again in 
the general disorder. Twenty thousand men gathered round the 
"oak of Reformation" near Norwich; and repulsing the royal troops 
in a desperate engagement, renewed the old cries for a removal of 
evil counselors, a prohibition of inclosures, and redress for the griev- 
ances of the poor. 

Revolt was every where stamped out in blood ; but the weakness 
which the Protector had shown in presence of the danger, and tlie 
irritation caused by the sanction he had given to the agrarian de- 
mands of the insurgents, ended in his fall. He was forced by his 
own party to resign, and his power passed to the Earl of Warwick, 
to whose ruthless severity the suppression of the revolt was mainly 
due. The change of governors, however, brought about no change 
of system. The rule of the upstart nobles who formed the Council 
of Regency became simply a rule of terror. " The greater part of 
the people," one of their creatures, Cecil, avowed, " is not in favor 
of defending this cause, but of aiding its adversaries, the greater 
part of the nobles who absent themselves from court, all the bishops 
save three or four, almost all the judges and lawyers, almost all the 
justices of the peace, the priests who can move their flocks any way ; 
for the whole of the commonalty is in such a state of irritation 
that it will easily follow any stir toward change." But with their 



366 



HISTORY OF TSE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



triuni])!! over the revolt, Cranmer and his colleagues advanced yet 
more boldly in the career of innovation. Four prelates who ad- 
hered to the older system were deprived of their sees and com- 
mitted, on frivolous pretexts, to the Tower. A crowning defiance 
was given to the doctrine of the mass by an order to demolish the 
stone altars, and replace them by wooden tables, which were 
stationed for the most part in the middle of the church. The new 
Prayer-book was revised, and every change made in it leaned di- 
rectly toward the extreme Protestantism which was at this time 
finding a home at Geneva. The Forty- two Articles of Religion, 
which were now introduced, though since reduced by omissions to 
thirty-nine, have remained to this day the formal standard of doc- 
trine in the English Church. The sufferings of the Protestants 
had failed to teach them the worth of religious liberty ; and a new 
code of ecclesiastical laws, which was ordered to be drawn up by a 
board of commissioners as a substitute for the canon law of the 
Catholic Church, although it shrank from the penalty of death, 
attached that of perpetual imprisonment or exile to the crimes of 
heresy, blasphemy, and adultery, and declared excommunication to 
involve a severance of the offender from the mercy of God, and his 
deliverance into the tyranny of the devil. Delays in the completion 
of this code prevented its legal establishment during Edwai'd's 
reign (it was quietly dropped by Elizabeth), but the use of the new 
Liturgy and attendance at the new service were enforced by impris- 
onment, and subscription to the Articles of Faith was demanded by 
royal authority from all clergymen, church -wardens, and school- 
masters. The distaste for changes so hurried, and so rigorously 
enforced, was increased by the daring speculations of the more ex-i 
treme Protestants. The real value of the rehgious revolution of 
the sixteenth century to mankind lay, not in its substitution of one 
creed for another, but in the new spirit of inquiry, the new freedom 
of thought and of discussion, which were awakened during the proc- 
ess of change. But however familiar such a truth may be to us, 
it was absolutely hidden from the England of the time. Men heard 
Math horror that the foundations of faith and morality were ques- 
tioned, polygamy advocated, oaths denounced as unlawful, commu- 
nity of goods raised into a sacred obligation, the very Godhead 
of the Founder of Christianity denied. The repeal of the Statute 
of Heresy left the powers of the common law intact, and Cranmer 
availed himself of these to send heretics of the last class without 
mercy to the stake ; but within the Church itself the Primate's de- 
sire for uniformity was roughly resisted by the more ardent mem- 
bers of his own party. Hooper, who had been named Bishop of 
Gloucester, refused to wear the episcopal habits, and denounced 
them as the livery of the "harlot of Babylon," a name for the Pa- 
pacy which was supposed to have been discovered in the Apocalypse. 
Ecclesiastical order was almost at an end. Priests flung aside the 
surplice as superstitious. Patrons of livings presented their hunts- 
men or gamekeepers to the benefices in their gift, and pocketed 
the stipend. All teaching of divinity ceased at the universities: 



VII.] 



THE EEFOBMATION. 



367 



the students indeed had fallen off in numbers, the libraries were in 
part scattered or burned, the intellectual impulse of the ISTew Learn- 
ing had died away. One noble measure indeed, the foundation of 
eighteen grammar schools, was destined to throw a lustre over the 
name of Edward, but it had no time to bear fruit in his reign. All 
that men saw was religious and political chaos, in which ecclesias- 
tical order had perished, and in which politics was dying down into 
the squabbles of a knot of nobles over the spoils of the Church and 
the Crown. The plunder of the chantries and the guilds failed to 
glut the appetite of the crew of spoilers. Half the lands of every 
see Avere flung to them in vain ; the see of Durham had been 
wholly suppressed to satisfy their greed; and the whole endow- 
ments of the Church were now threatened with confiscation. But 
while the courtiers gorged themselves with manors, the treasury 
grew poorer. The coinage was debased. Crown -lands to the 
value of five millions of our modern money had been granted away 
to the friends of Somerset and Warwick. The royal expenditure 
had mounted in seventeen years to more than four times its previ- 
ous total. It is clear that England must soon have risen against 
the misrule of the Protectorate, if the Protectorate had not fallen 
by the intestine divisions of the plunderers themselves. 



Section II.— Tlie Martyi-s. 155 3—1 558. 
[Authorities. — As before.] 



The waning health of Edward warned Warwick, who had now 
become Duke of Northumberland, of an unlooked-for danger. 
Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Arragon, who had been placed 
next in the succession to Edward by her father's will, remained 
firm amid all the changes of the time to the older faith; and her 
accession threatened to be the signal for its return. But the bigot- 
ry of the young King was easily brought to consent to a daring 
scheme by which her rights might be set aside. Edward's " plan," 
as Northumberland had dictated it, annulled the will of his father, 
though the right of determining the succession had been intrusted 
to Henry by a statute of the realm. It set aside both Mary and 
Elizabeth, who stood next in the will, as bastards. With this ex- 
clusion of the direct line of Henry the Eighth the succession would 
vest, if the rules of hereditary descent were observed, in the de- 
scendants of his elder sister Margaret; who had become by her 
first husband, James the Fourth of Scotland, the grandmother of 
the young Scottish Queen, Mary Stuart, and, by a second marriage 
with the Earl of Angus, was the grandmother of Henry Lennox, 
Lord Darnley. Margaret's descendants, however, were regarded 
as incapacitated by their exclusion from mention in Henry's will. 
The descendants of her sister Mary, the younger daughter of Hen- 
ry the Seventh, by her marriage with Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, 
had been placed by the late King next in succession to his own chil- 



368 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



dven ; and Mary's child Frances was still living, the mother of three 
daughters by her marriage with Lord Gi'ey, who had been raised 
to the dukedom of Suffolk. Frances, however, was passed over, 
and Edward's " plan" named her eldest child Jane as his successor. 
The marriage of Jane Grey Avitli Guildford Dudley, the fourth son 
of Northumberland, was all that was needed to complete the un- 
scrupulous plot. The consent of the judges and council to her suc- 
cession was extorted by the violence of the Duke, and the new sov- 
ereign was proclaimed on Edward's death. But the temper of the 
whole people rebelled against so lawless a usurpation. The eastern 
counties rose as one man to support Mary; and when Northumber- 
land marched from London with ten thousand at his back to crush 
the rising, the Londoners, Protestant as they wei'e, showed their 
ill-will by a stubborn silence. " The people crowd to look upon us," 
the Duke noted gloomily, " but not one calls ' God speed ye.' " His 
courage suddenly gave way, and his retreat to Cambridge was the 
signal for a general defection. Northumberland himself threw his 
cap into tlie air and shouted with his men for Queen Mary. But 
his submission failed to avert his doom ; and the death of Northum- 
berland drew with it the imprisonment in the Tower of the innocent 
and hapless girl, whom he had made the tool of his ambition. The 
whole system which had been pursued during Edward's reign fell 
with a sudden crash. London alone remained true to Protestant- 
ism, Over all the rest of the country the tide of reaction swept 
without a check. The married priests were driven from their 
churches; the new Prayer-book was set aside; the mass was re- 
stored with a burst of popular enthusiasm. The imprisoned bish- 
ops found themselves again in their sees ; and Latimer and Ci"an-» 
mer, who were charged with a share in the usurpation, took their 
places in the Tower. But with the restoration of the system of 
Henry the Eighth the popular impulse was satisfied. The people 
had no more sympathy with Mary's leanings toward Rome tlian 
with the violence of the Protestants. The Parliament, while eager 
to restore the mass and the laws against heresy, clung obstinately 
to the Church-lands and to the royal supremacy. 

Nor was England more favorable to the marriage on which, from 
motives both of policy and religious zeal, Mary had set her heart. 
The Emperor had ceased to be the object of hope or confidence as 
a mediator who would at once purify the Church from abuses and re- 
store the unity of Christendom ; he had ranged himself definitely on 
the side of the Papacy and of the Council of Trent; and the cruel- 
ties of the Liquisition, which he had introduced into Flanders, gave 
a terrible indication of the bigotry which he was to bequeath to his 
house. The marriage with his son Philip, whose hand he offered to 
his cousin Mary, meant an absolute submission to the Papacy, and 
the undoing not only of the Protestant Reformation, but of the more 
moderate reforms of the New Learning. On the other hand, it of- 
fered the political advantage of securing Mary's throne against the 
pretensions of the young Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart, who had 
become formidable by her marriage with the heir of the French 



VII.] 



TRE BEFOBMATION. 



369 



crown ; mid whose adherents ah-eady alleged the illegitimate birth 
of both Mary and Elizabeth, through the annulling of their moth- 
ers' marriages, as a ground for denying their right of succession. 
To the issue of the marriage he proposed, Charles promised the 
heritage of the Low Countries, while he accepted the demand made 
by Mary's minister, Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, of complete 
independence both of policy and action on the part of England, in 
case of such a union. The temptation was great, and Mary's pas- 
sion overleaped all obstacles. But in spite of the toleration which 
she had promised, and had as yet observed, the announcement of 
her design drove the Protestants into a panic of despair. The 
Duke of Suffolk suddenly appeared at Leicester, and proclaimed 
his daughter queen ; but the rising proved a failure. The danger 
was far more formidable when the dread that Spaniards were com- 
ing " to conquer the realm" roused Kent into revolt under Sir 
Thomas Wyatt, the bravest and most accomplished Englishman of 
liis day. The ships in the Thames submitted to be seized by the 
insurgents. The train-bands of London, who marched under the 
Duke of Norfolk against them, deserted to the rebels in a mass 
with shouts of "A Wyatt! a Wyatt! we are all Englishmen!" 
Had the insurgents moved quickly on the capital, its gates would 
at once have been flung open, and success would have been assured. 
But in the critical moment Mary was saved by her queenly cour- 
age. Riding boldly to the Guildhall, she appealed, with " a man's 
voice," to the loyalty of the citizens, and when Wyatt appeared on 
the Southwark bank the bridge was secured. The issue hung on 
the question, which side London would take ; and the insurgent 
leader pushed desperately up the Thames, seized the bridge at 
Kingston, threw his force across the river, and marched rapidly 
back on the capital. The night march along miry roads wearied 
and disorganized his men, the bulk of whom were cut off from 
their leader by a royal force which had gathered in the fields at 
what is now Hyde Park Corner, but Wyatt himself, with a handful 
of followers, pushed desperately on to Temple Bar. " I have kept 
touch," he cried, as he sank exhausted at the gate ; but it was 
closed, and his adherents within were powerless to effect their 
promised diversion in his favor. 

The courage of the Queen, who had refused to fly even while the 
rebels were marching beneath her palace walls, Avas only equaled by 
her terrible revenge. The hour was come when the Protestants 
were at her feet, and she struck without mercy. Lady Jane, her 
father, and her uncles atoned for the ambition of the House of Suf- 
folk by the death of traitors. Wyatt and his chief adherents fol- 
lowed them to the block, while the bodies of the poorer insurgents 
were dangling on gibbets throughout Kent. Elizabeth, who had 
with some reason been suspected of complicity in the insurrection, 
was sent to the Tower, and only saved from death by the interposi- 
tion of the Emperor and of the Council. But the failure of the re- 
volt not only crushed the Protestant party, it secured the marriage 
on which Mary was resolved. She used it to wring a reluctant con- 

24 



Tlie sub- 
mission to 
Some. 



370 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



sent from the Parliament, and meeting Philip at Winchester in the 
ensuing summer became his wife. The temporizing measures to 
which the Queen had been forced by the earlier difficulties of her 
reign could now be laid safely aside. Mary was resolved to bring 
about a submission to Rome ; and her minister Gardiner, who, as 
the moderate party which had supported the policy of Henry the 
Eighth saw its hopes disappear, ranged himself definitely on the side 
of a unity which could now only be brought about by reconciliation 
with the Papacy on its own terms, was, if less religiously zealous, 
politically as resolute as herself. The Spanish match Avas hardly 
concluded, when the negotiations with Rome were brought to a 
final issue. The attainder of Reginald Pole, who had been ap- 
pointed by the Pope to receive the submission of the realm, was re- 
versed ; and the Legate, who had entered London by the river with 
his cross gleaming from the prow of his barge, "was solemnly wel- 
comed in full Parliament. The two Houses decided by a formal 
vote to return to the obedience of the Papal See, and received on 
their knees the absolution which freed the realm from the guilt in- 
curred by its schism and heresy. But, even in the hour of her tri- 
umph, tlie temper both of Parliament and the nation warded the 
Queen of the failure of her hope to bind England to the purely 
Catholic policy of Spain. The growing. independence of the two 
Houses was seen in their rejection of measure after measure pro- 
posed by the Crown, In spite of Mary's hatred of Elizabeth, they 
refused to change the order of succession in favor of Philip. 
Though their great Bill of Reconciliation repealed the whole eccle- 
siastical legislation of Henry the Eighth and his successor, they re- 
jected all proposals for the restoration of Church-lands to the clev- 
gy. It was to no purpose that the old statute for the burning of 
heretics, together with a bill for the restoration of the jurisdiction 
of the bishops, was again introduced into Parliament. Nor was 
the temper of the nation at large less decided. The sullen discon- 
tent of London compelled its bishop, Bonner, to withdraw the in- 
quisitorial articles by Avhich he hoped to purge his diocese of here- 
sy. Even the Royal Council were divided, and in the very interests 
of Catholicism the Emperor himself counseled prudence and delay. 
But whether from without or from within, warning was wasted on 
the fierce bigotry of the Queen. 

It Avas a moment Avhen the prospects of the party of reform 
seemed utterly hopeless. Spain had taken openly the lead in the 
great Catholic movement, and England was being dragged, hoAvev- 
er reluctantly, by the Spanish marriage into the current of reaction. 
Its opponents were broken by the failure of their revolt, and un- 
popular through the memory of their violence and greed. But the 
cause Avhich prosperity had ruined revived in the dark hour of pei'- 
secution. If the Protestants had not known how to govern, they 
kncAV how to die. The story of RoAvland Taylor, the vicar of 
Hadleigh, tells us more of the work Avhich Avas now begun, and of 
the effect it Avas likely to produce, than pages of historic disserta- 
tion. Although Parliament had refused to enact the Statute of 



VII.] 



THE EEFOBMATION. 



371 



Heresy, it was still possible to fall back on the powers of the com- 
mon law, and Gardiner, at the head of the Council, pressed busily 
on the work of death. Taylor, who as a man of mark had been 
one of the first victims chosen for execution, was arrested in Lon- 
don and condemned to suffer in his own parish. His wife, " sus- 
pecting that her husband should that night be carried away," had 
waited through the darkness with her children in the porch of St. 
Botolph's beside Aldgate. "Now when the sheriff his company 
came against St. Botolph's Church, Elizabeth cried, saying, ' Oh, 
my dear father ! Mother ! mother ! liere is my father led away !' 
Then cried his wife, 'Rowland, Rowland, where art thou? — for it 
was a very dark morning, that the one could not see the other. Dr. 
Taylor answered, ' I am here, dear wife,' and staid. The sheriff's 
men would have led him forth, but the sheriff said, ' Stay a little, 
masters, I pray you, and let him speak to his wife.' Then came 
she to him, and he took his daughter Mary in his arms, and he and 
his wife and Elizabeth knelt down and said the Lord's Prayer. At 
which sight the sheriff wept apace, and so did divers others of the 
company. After they had prayed, he rose up and kissed his wife 
and shook her by the hand, and said, * Farewell, my dear wife; be 
of good comfort, for I am quiet in my conscience ! God shall still 
be a father to my children.' .... Then said his wife, ' God be with 
thee, dear Rowland ! I will, with God's grace, meet thee at Had- 
leigh.' .... All the way Dr. Taylor was merry and cheerful as one 
that accounted himself going to a most pleasant banquet or brid- 
al Coming within two miles of Hadleigh, he desired to light 

off his horse, which done, he leaped and set a frisk or twain as men 
commonly do for dancing. ' Why, Master Doctor,' quoth the sher- 
iff, ' how do you now ?' He answered, ' Well, God be praised. Mas- 
ter Sheriff, never better ; for now I know I am almost at home. I 
lack not past two stiles to go over, and I am even at my Father's 
house !'.... The streets of Hadleigh were beset on both sides with 
men and women of the town and country who waited to see him ; 
whom when they beheld so led to death, with weeping eyes and lam- 
entable voices, they cried, 'Ah, good Lord ! there goeth our good 
shepherd from us !' " The journey was at last over. " ' What place 
is this,' he asked, ' and what meaneth it that so much people are 
gathered together?' It was answered, 'It is Oldham Common, the 
place where you must suffer, and the people are come to look upon 
you.' Then said he, 'Thanked be God,' I am even at home!'. . :. 
But when the people saw his I'everend and ancient face, with a long 
white beard, they burst out with weeping tears, and cried, saying, 
'God save thee, good Dr. Taylor; God strengthen thee and help 
thee ; the Holy Ghost comfort thee !' He wished, but was not suf- 
fered, to speak. When he had prayed, he went to the stake and 
kissed it, and set himself into a pitch-barrel which they had set for 
him to stand on, and so stood with his back upright against the 
stake, with his hands folded together and his eyes toward heaven, 
and so let himself be burned." One of the executioners "cruelly 
cast a fagot at him, which hit upon his head and brake his face that 



372 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the blood ran down his visage. Then said Dr. Taylor, ' Oh, friend, 
I have harm enough — what needed that?' " One more act of bru- 
tality brought his sufferings to an end. " So stood he still without 
either crying or moving, with his hands folded together, till Soyce 
with a halberd struck him on the head that the brains fell out, and 
the dead corpse fell down into the fire." 

The terror of death was powerless against men like these. Bon- 
ner, the Bishop of London, to whom, as bishop of the diocese in 
which the Council sat, its victims were generally delivered for exe- 
cution, but who in spite of the nickname and hatred which his offi- 
cial prominence in the work of death earned him, seems to have been 
naturally a good-humored and merciful man, asked a youth who 
was brought before him whether he thought he could bear the fire. 
The boy at once held his hand without flinching in the flame of a 
candle which stood by. Rogers, a fellow-worker with Tyndale in 
the translation of the Bible, and one of the foremost among the 
Protestant preachers, died bathing his hands in the flame "as if it 
had been in cold water." Even the commonest lives gleamed for a 
moment into poetry at fhe stake. " Pray for me," a boy, William 
Brown, who had been brought homo to Brentwood to suffer, asked 
of the by-standers round. " I will pray no more for thee," one of 
them replied, " than I will pray for a dog." " Then," said William, 
" Son of God shine upon me ;" and immediately the sun in the ele- 
ments shone out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was con- 
strained to look another way ; whereat the people mused, because 
it was so dark a little time before. The work of terror failed in 
the very ends for which it was wrought. The panic which had 
driven a host of Protestants over-sea to find refuge at Strasburg ou 
Geneva soon passed away. The old sj)irit of insolent defiance, of 
outrageous violence, was roused again at the challenge of persecu- 
tion. A Protestant hung a string of puddings round a priest's neck 
in derision of his beads. The restored images were grossly insulted. 
The old scurrilous ballads were heard again in the streets. One 
miserable wretch, driven to frenzy, stabbed the priest of St. Marga- 
ret's as he stood with the chalice in his hand. It was a more for- 
midable sign of the times that acts of violence such as these no 
longer stirred the people at large to their former resentment. 
The horror of the persecution left no room for other feelings. Ev- 
ery death at the stake won hundreds to the cause of its victims. 
"You have lost the hearts of twenty thousand that were rank Pa- 
pists," ran a letter to Bonner, " within these twelve months." Bon- 
ner, indeed, never very zealous in the cause, was sick of his work. 
Gardiner was dead, and the energy of the bishops quietly relaxed. 
But Mary had no thought of hesitation in the cause she had begun. 
"Rattling letters" from the Queen roused the lagging prelates to 
fresh persecution, and in three months fifty victims were hurried to 
their doom. It was resolved to bring the chiefs of the Protestant 
party to the stake. Two prelates had already perished ; Hooper, 
the Bishop of Gloucester, had been burned in his own cathedral city ; 
Ferrars, the Bishop of St. David's, had suffered at Caermarthen. 



VII.] 



TEE EEFOBMATION. 



373 



Latimer and Bishop Ridley of London wei-e now drawn from their 
prisons at Oxford. " Play the man, Master Ridley," cried the old 
preacher of the Reformation as the flames shot nj) around him ; 
"we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England 
as I trust shall never be put out." One victim remained, far be- 
neath many who had preceded him in character, but high above 
them in his position in the Church of England. The other prelates 
who had suffered had been created after the separation from Rome, 
and were hardly regarded as bishops by their opponents. But, 
whatever had been his part in the schism, Cranmer had received 
his pallium from the Pope. He was in the eyes of all Archbishop 
of Canterbury, the successor of St. Augustine and of St. Thomas 
in the second see of Western Christendom. To burn the Primate 
of the English Church for heresy was to shut out meaner victims 
f i-om all hope of escape. But revenge and religious zeal alike urged 
l^'Iary to bring Cranmer to the stake. First among the many decis- 
ions in which the Archbishop had prostituted justice to Henry's 
will stood that by which he had annulled the King's marriage with 
Catherine and declared Mary a bastard. The last of his political 
acts had been to join, Avhether reluctantly or not, in the shameless 
plot to exclude Mary from the throne. His great position, too, 
made him more than any man the representative of the religious 
revolution which had passed over the land. His figure stood with 
those of Henry and of Cromwell on the frontispiece •of the English 
Bible. The decisive change 'which had been given to the character 
of the Reformation under Edward was due wholly to Cranmer. It 
was his voice that men heard and still hear in the accents of the 
English Liturgy which he compiled in the quiet retirement of Oxford. 
As an archbishop Cranmer's judgment rested with no meaner tri- 
bunal than that of Rome, and his execution was necessarilj'- delayed. 
But the courage which he had shown since the accession of Mary 
gave way the moment his final sentence was announced. The mor- 
al cowardice which had displayed itself in his miserable compliance 
with the lust and despotism of Henry, displayed itself again in the 
six recantations by which he hoped to purchase pardon. But par- 
don was impossible ; and Cranmer's strangely mingled nature found 
a power in its very weakness when he was brought into the church 
of St. Mary to repeat his recantation on the way to the stake. 
" Now," ended his address to the hushed congregation before him, 
"now I come to the great thing that t^oubleth my conscience more 
than any other thing that ever I said or did in my life, and that is 
the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth ; which here I 
now renounce and refuse as things written by my hand contrary to 
the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death 
to save my life if it might be. And forasmuch as my hand offend- 
ed in Avriting contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the 
first punished ; for if I come to the fire, it shall be the first burned." 
" This was the hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the stake, 
" therefore it shall suffer first punishment ;" and holding it steadily 
in the flame, "he never stirred nor cried" till life was gone. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



It was with the unerring instinct of a popular movement that, 
among a crowd of far more heroic sufferers, the Protestants fixed, 
in spite of his recantations, on the martyrdom of Cranmer as the 
death-blow to Catholicism in England. For one man who felt with- 
in him the joy of Rowland Taylor at the prospect of the stake, 
there were thousands who felt the shuddering dread of Cranmer. 
The triumphant cry of Latimer could reach only hearts as bold as his 
own ; but the sad pathos of the Primate's humiliation and repent- 
ance struck chords of sympathy and pity in the hearts of all. It 
is from that moment that we may trace the bitter remembrance of 
the blood shed in the cause of Rome ; which, however pai'tial and 
unjust it must seem to an historic observer, still lies graven deep 
in the temper of the English people. The failure of any attempt 
to make England really useful to the Catholic cause became clear 
even to the bigoted Philip ; and on the disappearance of all hope 
of a child, he left the country, in spite of Mary's passionate entreat- 
ies, never to return. But the wretched Queen struggled desperate- 
ly on. In the face of the Parliament's refusal to restore the con- 
fiscated Church -lands, she did her best to undo Henry's work. 
She refounded all she could of the abbeys which had been sup- 
pressed. She refused the first-fruits of the clergy. Above all, she 
pressed on the work of persecution. It had sunk now from bishops 
and priests to the people itself. The sufferers Avere sent in batches 
to the flames. »In a single day thirteen victims, two of them wom- 
en, were burned at Stratfoi'd-le-Bow. Seventy-three Protestants of 
Colchester were dragged thi'ough the streets of London, tied to a 
single rope. A new commission for the suppression of heresy was 
exempted by royal authority from all restrictions of law which fet- 
tered its activity. The universities Avere visited ; and the corpses 
of the foreign teachers who had found a resting-place there under 
Edward — Bucer, Fagius, and Peter Martyr — were torn from their 
graves and reduced to ashes. The penalties of martial law were 
threatened against, the possessors of heretical books issued from 
Geneva ; the treasonable contents of which indeed, and their con- 
stant exhortations to rebellion and civil war, justly called for stern 
repression. But the loyalty which had seated Mary on the throne 
was fast dying away ; and petty insurrections showed the revulsion 
of popular feeling. Open sympathy began to be shown to the suf- 
ferers for conscience' sake. In the three years of the persecution 
three hundred victims had perished at the stake. The people sick- 
ened at the work of death. The crowd round the fire at Sraithfield 
shouted "Amen" to the prayer of seven martyrs whom Bonner had 
condemned, and prayed in its turn that " God would strengthen 
them." Disease and famine quickened the general discontent 
which Avas roused Avhen, in spite of the pledges given at her mar- 
riage, Mary dragged England into a war to support Philip — who 
on the Emperor's resignation had succeeded to his dominions of 
Spain, Flanders, and the New World — in a struggle against France. 
The Avar had hardly begun when, with charactei-istic secrecy and 
enei-gy, the Duke of Guise flung himself upon Calais, and compelled 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



375 



it to surrender before succor could arrive. " The brightest jewel 
in the English crown," as all then held it to be, was suddenly reft 
away; and the surrender of Guisnes, which soon followed, left En- 
gland without a foot of land on the Continent. But so profound 
was the discontent that even this blow failed to rally the country 
round the Queen. The forced loan to which she had resorted came, 
in slowly. The levies mutinied and dispersed. The death of Mary 
alone averted a general revolt, and a burst of enthusiastic joy hailed 
the accession of Elizabeth. 

Section III.— EJizabetli. 1558—1560. 

[AutJiorities. — Camden's " Life of Elizabeth." For the ecclesiastical questions of 
this period, Strype's "Annals of the Eeformation," his "Life of Parker," and the 
"Zurich Letters," published by the Parker Society, are of primary importance. 
Cardinal Granvelle's correspondence illustrates the policy of Spain, and M. Teulet 
has published a valuable series of Prench dispatches. The "Burleigh Papers" 
(with which compare Nares's cumbrous "Life of Lord Burleigh") and, above all, 
the State Papers, now being calendared for the Master of the Polls, throw a new 
light on Elizabeth's own policy. Mr. Proude's account of her reign (vols. vii. to 
xii.) is of high value, and his extracts from State Papers of Cecil and the documents 
at Simancas have cleared up many of its greatest difficulties.] 



Never had the fortunes of England sunk to a lower ebb than at 
the moment when Elizabeth mounted the throne^, The country 
was humiliated by defeat, and brought to the verge of rebellion 
by the bloodshed and misgovernment of Mary's reign. The old 
social discontent, trampled down for a time by the mercenary 
troops of Somerset, still remained a perpetual menace to public 
order. The religious strife had passed beyond hope of reconcilia- 
tion, now that the Reformers were parted from their opponents 
by the fires of Smithfield, and the party of the New Learning all 
but dissolved. The Catholics were bound helplessly to Rome. 
Protestantism, burned at home and hurled into exile abroad, had 
become a fiercer thing ; and was pouring back from Geneva with 
dreams of revolutionary change in Church and State. England, 
dragged at the heels of Philip into a useless and ruinous war, was 
left without an ally save Spain ; wliile France, mistress of Calais, 
became mistress of the Channel. Not only was Scotland a stand- 
ing danger in the North, through the French marriage of Mary 
Stuart and its consequent bondage to French policy ; but its queen 
had assumed the style and arms of an English sovereign, and 
threatened to rouse every Catholic throughout the realm against 
Elizabeth's title. In presence of this host of dangers the country 
lay utterly helpless, without army or fleet, or the means of man- 
ning one ; for the treasury, already drained by the waste of Ed- 
Avard's reign, had been utterly exhausted by Mary's restoration of 
the Church-lands, and by the cost of her war with France. 

England's one hope lay in the character of her queen. Eliza- 
beth was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had much 
of her mother's beauty; her figure was commanding, her face 
long, but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick and fine. She 



37G 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Skc. Ill, 



Elizabeth, 
1558- 
1560. 



had grown up, amid the liberal culture of Henry's Court, a bold 
horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful dancer, a skilled musician, 
and an accomplished scholar. She read every morning a portion 
of Demosthenes, and could " rub up her rusty Greek" at need to 
band}'' pedantry with a vice-chancellor. But she was far from be- 
ing a mere pedant. The new literature Avhich was springing up 
around her found constant welcome in her Court. She spoke 
Italian and French as fluently as her mother tongue. She was 
/^familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. In spite of the affectation of 
her style, and her taste for anagrams and puerilities, she listen- 
ed with delight to the "Faerie Queen," and found a smile for 
"Master Spenser" when he appeared in the presence. Her moral 
'temper recalled in its strange contrasts the mixed blood within 
her veins. She was at once the daughter of Henry and of Anne 
Boleyn. From her father she inherited her frank and hearty ad- 
dress, her love of popularity and of free intercourse with the peo- 
ple, her dauntless courage, and her amazing self-confidence. Her 
harsh, man-like voice, her impetuous Avill, her pride, her furious 
outbursts of anger, came to her with her Tudor blood. She rated 
great nobles as if they were school-boys, she met the insolence 
of Essex with a box on the ear; she would break, now and then, 
into the gravest deliberations, to swear at her ministers like a fish- 
wife. But strangely in contrast with the violent outlines of lier 
Tudor temper stood the sensuous, self-indulgent nature she de- 
rived from Anne Boleyn. Splendor and pleasure were with Eliza- 
beth the very air she breathed. Her delight was to move in per- 
petual progresses from castle to castle through a series of gor- 
geous pageants, fanciful and extravagant as a caliph's dream. She' 
loved gayety and laughter and wit. A happy retort or a finished 
compliment never failed to win her favor. She hoarded jewels. 
Her dresses were innumerable. Her vanity remained, even to old 
age, the vanity of a coquette in her teens. No adulation was too 
fulsome for her, no flattery of her beauty too gross. " To see her 
was heaven," Hutton told her; "the lack of her was hell." She 
would play with her rings, that her courtiers might note the deli- 
cacy of her hands ; or dance a coranto, that the French embassador, 
hidden dexterously behind a curtain, might report her sprightli- 
ness to his master. Her levity, her frivolous laughter, her unwom- 
anly jests gave color to a thousand scandals. Her character, in 
fact, like her portraits, was utterly without shade. Of womanly 
reserve or self-restraint she knew nothing. No instinct of delicacy 
veiled the voluptuous temper which had. broken out in the romps 
of her girlhood, and showed itself almost ostentatiously through- 
out her later life. Personal beauty in a man was a sure passjaort 
to her liking. She jDatted handsome young squires on the neck 
when they knelt to kiss her hand, and fondled her " sweet Robin," 
Lord Leicester, in the face of the Court. 

It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted held 
Elizabeth almost to the last to be little more than a frivolous 
woman ; or that Philip of Spain wondered how " a wanton" could 
hold in check the policy of the Escurial. But the Elizabeth whom 



VII.] 



TEE REFORMATION. 



S1\ 



tliey saw Avas far from being all of Elizabeth. The willfulness of 
Henry, the triviality of Anne Boleyn, played over the surface of a 
nature hard as steel, a temper purely intellectual, the very type 
of reason untouched by imagination or passion. Luxurious and 
pleasure-loving as she seemed, Elizabeth lived simply and frugal- 
ly, and she worked hard. Her vanity and caprice had no weight 
whatever with her in state aifairs. The coquette of the jDresence- 
chamber became the coolest and hardest of politicians at the 
Council-board. Fresh from the flattery of her courtiers, she would 
tolerate no flattery in the closet; she was herself plain and down- 
right of speech with her councilors, and she looked for a corre- 
sponding plainness of speech in return. Her expenditure was par- 
simonious, and even miserly. If any trace of her sex lingered in 
her actual statesmanship, it was seen in the simplicity and tenacity 
of purpose that often underlie a woman's fluctuations of feeling. 
It was this in part which gave her her marked superiority over 
the statesmen of her time. No nobler grouj^ of ministers ever 
gathered round a council-board than those who gathered round 
the Council-board of Elizabeth. But she is the instrument of 
none. She listens, she weighs, she uses or puts by the counsels of 
each in turn, but her policy as a whole is her own. It was a pol- 
icy, not of genius, but of good sense. Her aims were simple and 
obvious: to preserve her throne, to keep England out of war, to 
restore civil and religious order. Something of womanly caution 
and timidity, perhaps, backed the passionless indifference with 
which she set aside the larger schemes of ambition which were 
ever opening before her eyes. She was resolute in her refusal of 
the Low Countries. She rejected with a laugh the offers of the 
Protestants to make her " head of the religion" and " mistress of 
the seas." But her amazing success in the end sprang mainly 
from this wise limitation of her aims. She had a finer sense than 
any of her councilors of her real resources ; she knew instinctively 
how far she could go, and what she could do. Her cold, critieaf 
intellect was never swayed by enthusiasm or by panic either to 
exaggerate or to underestimate her risks or her power. 

Of political wisdom, indeed, in its larger and more generous 
sense, Elizabeth had little or none ; but her political tact was un- 
erring. She seldom saw her course at a glance, but she played 
with a hundred courses, fitfully and discursively, as a musician 
runs his fingers over the key-boai'd, till she hit suddenly upon the 
right one. Such a nature was essentially practical, and of the 
present. She distrusted a plan, in fact, just in proportion to its 
speculative range, or its outlook into the future. Her notion of 
statemanship lay in watching how things turned out around her, 
and in seizing the moment for making the best of them, A pol- 
icy of this limited, practical, tentative order was not only best 
suited to the England of her day, to its small resources and tlie 
transitional chai'acter of its religious and political belief, but it 
was one eminently suited to Elizabeth's peculiar powers. It was 
a policy of detail, and in details her wonderful readiness and in- 
genuity found scope for their exercise. "No war, my lords," the 



318 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Queen used to cry imperiously at the Council-board, "no war!" 
but her hatred of war sprang less from aversion to blood or to ex- 
pense, real as was her aversion to both, than from the foct that 
peace left the field open to the diplomatic mancBuvres and in- 
trigues in which she excelled. It was her delight in the con- 
sciousness of her ingenuity which broke out in a thousand puckish 
freaks, freaks in which one can hardly see any purpose beyond the 
purpose of sheer mystification. She reveled in " by-ways" and 
"crooked ways." She played with grave cabinets as a cat plays 
with a mouse, and with mucli of the same feline delight in the 
mere embarrassment of her victims. When she was weary of 
mystifying foreign statesmen, she turned to find fresh sport in 
mystifying her own ministers. Had Elizabeth written the story 
of her reign, she M^ould have prided herself^ not on the triumph of 
England or the ruin of Spain, but on the sldll with which she had 
hoodwinked and outwitted every statesman in Europe during fif- 
ty years. Nor was her trickery without political value. Ignoble, 
inexpressibly wearisome as the Queen's diplomacy seems to us 
now, tracing it as we do through a thousand dispatches, it succeed- 
ed in its main end. It gained time, and every year that was gain- 
ed doubled Elizabeth's strength. Nothing is more revolting in 
the Queen, but notliing is more characteristic, than her shame- 
less mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but in the profu- 
sion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer 
in Christendom. A falsehood was to her simply an intellectual 
means of meeting a difiicultj^ ; and the ease with which she assert- 
ed or denied whatever suited her purpose was only equaled by the 
cynical indifierence with which she met the exposure of her lies as 
soon as their purpose was answered. The same purely intellectual 
view of things showed itself in the dexterous use she made of her 
very faults. Her levity carried her gayly over moments of detec- 
tion and embarrassment where better women would have died of 
shame. She screened her tentative and hesitating statesmanship 
under the natural timidity and vacillation of her sex. She turned 
her very luxury and sports to good account. There were mo- 
ments of grave danger in her reign when the country remained 
indifferent to its perils, as it saw the Queen give her days to hawk- 
ing and hunting, and her nights to dancing and plays. Her vanity 
and affectation, her womanly fickleness and caprice, all had their 
part in the diplomatic comedies she played with the successive 
candidates for her hand. If political necessities made her life a 
lonely one, she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting Avar 
and conspiracies by love sonnets and romantic interviews, or of 
saining a year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning out of a 
flirtation. 

As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of lying and 
intrigue, the sense of her greatness is almost lost in a sense of con- 
tempt. But, wrapped as they were in a cloud of mystery, the 
aims of her policy were throughout temperate and simple, and they 
were pursued with a singular tenacity. The sudden acts of ener- 
gy which from time to time broke her habitual hesitation proved 



VIL] 



TRE REFORMATION. 



379 



that it was no hesitation of weakness. Elizabeth could wait and 
finesse ; but when the hour was come she could strike, and strike 
hard. Her natural temper, indeed, tended to a rash self-confidence 
rather than to self-distrust. She had, as strong natures always 
have, an unbounded confidence in her luck. "Her Majesty counts 
much on fortune," Walsingham wrote bitterly; "I wish she would 
trust more in Almighty God." The diplomatists who censured at 
one moment her irresolution, her delay, her changes of front, cen- 
sured at the next her " obstinacy," her iron will, her defiance of 
what seemed to them inevitable ruin. " This woman," Philip's 
envoy wrote after a wasted remonstrance — " this woman is pos- 
sessed by a hundred thousand devils." To her own subjects, in- 
deed, who knew nothing of her manoeuvres and retreats, of her 
" by-ways" and " crooked ways," she seemed the embodiment of 
dauntless resolution. Brave as they were, the men who swept the 
Spanish main or glided between the icebergs of Baffin's Bay nev- 
er doubted that the palm of bravery lay with their Queen. Her 
steadiness and courage in the pursuit of her aims were equaled by 
the wisdom with which she chose the men to accomplish them. 
She had a quick eye for merit of any sort, and a wonderful power 
of enlisting its whole energy in her service. None of our sover- 
eigns ever gathered such a group of advisers to their Council- 
board as gathered round the Council-board of Elizabeth, but the 
sagacity which chose Burleigh and Walsingham was just as un- 
erring in its choice of the meanest of her agents. Her success, in- 
deed, in securing from the beginning of lier reign to its end, with 
the single exception of Leicester, precisely the right men for the 
work she set them to do. sprang in great measure from the noblest^ 



characteristic of he r intellect. If in loftiness of aim her temper 
fein)elow many oT'the tempers of her time, in the breadth of its 
range, in the universality of its sympathy, it stood far above them 
all. Elizabeth could talk poetry with Spenser and philosophy 
with Bruno ; she could discuss euphuism with Lyly, and enjoy 
the chivalry of Essex ; she could turn from talk of the last fash- 
ions to pore with Cecil over dispatches and treasury-books ; she 
could pass from tracking traitors with Walsingham to settle points 
of doctrine with Parker, or to calculate with Frobisher the chances 
of a northwest passage to the Indies. The versatility and many- 
sidedness of her mind enabled her to understand every phase of 
the intellectual movement of her day, and to fix by a sort of instinct 
on its higher representatives. But the greatness of the Queen rests 
above all on her power over her people. We have had grander 
and nobler rulers, but none so popular as Elizabeth. The passion 
of love, of loyalty, of admiration, which finds its most perfect ex- 
pression in the "Faerie Queen," pulsed as intensely through the 
veins of her meanest subjects. To England, during her reign of 
half a century, she was a virgin and a Protestant queen ; and her 
immorality, her absolute want of religious enthusiasm, failed ut- 
terly to blur the brightness of the national ideal. Her worst acts 
broke fruitlessly against the general devotion. A Puritan, whose 
hand she hacked off in a freak of tyrannous resentment, waved the 



Seo. III. 

Elizabeth. 
1558- 
1560. 



380 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



stump round his head, and shouted " God save Queen Elizabeth." 
Of her faults, indeed, England beyond the circle of her court knew 
little or nothing. The shiftings of her dijDlomacy were never 
seen outside the royal closet. The nation at. large could only 
judge her foreign policy by its main outlines, by its temperance 
and good sense, and, above all, by its success. But every English- 
man was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at home, in her love 
of peace, her instiuct of order, the firmness and moderatiou of her 
government, the judicious spirit of conciliation and compromise 
among warring factions, which gave the country an unexampled 
tranquillity at a time when almost every other country in Europe 
was torn with civil war. Every sign of the growing prosperity, 
the sight of London as it became the mart of the world, of state- 
ly mansions as they rose on every manor, told, and justly told, 
in Elizabeth's favor. In one act of her civil administration she 
showed the boldness and originality of a great ruler; for the open- 
ing of her reign saw her face the social difficulty which had so 
long impeded English progress, by the issue of a commission of in- 
quiry which ended in the solution of the problem by the system 
of poor laws. For commerce, indeed, laws could do little, and 
Elizabeth's active interference hindered rather than furthered its 
advance; but the interference was for the most part well meant, 
and her statue in the centre of the London Exchange was a trib- 
ute on the part of the merchant class to the interest with which 
she watched, and shared personally in, its enterprises. Her thrift 
won a general gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the 
martyrs threw into bright relief the aversion from bloodshed 
which was conspicuous in her earlier reign, and never wholly want- 
ing through its fiercer close. Above all, there was a general con- 
fidence in her instinctive knowledge of the national temper. Her 
finger Avas always on the jDublic pulse. She knew exactly when 
she could resist the feeling of her people, and when she must give 
way before the new sentiment of freedom which her policy had 
unconsciously fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had 
all the grace of victory ; and the frankness and unreserve of her 
surrender won back at once the love that her resistance had lost. 
Her attitude at home, in fact, was that of a woman whose pride in 
the well-being of her subjects, and whose longing for their favor, 
were the one warm touch in the coldness of her natural temper. 
If Elizabeth could be said to love any thing, she loved England. 
"Nothing," she said to her first Parliament in words of unwonted 
fire, " nothing, no worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me as 
the love and good-will of my subjects." And the love and good- 
will which were so dear to her she fully won. 

She clung perhaps to her popularity the more passionately that 
it hid in some measure from her the terrible loneliness of her life. 
She was the last of the Tudors, the last of Henry's children, and 
her nearest relatives were Mary Stuart and the House of Sufi"olk; 
one the avowed, the other the secret claimant of her throne. 
Among her mother's kindred she found but a distant cousin. 
Whatever womanly tenderness she had, wrapped itself around 



VIL] 



THE BEFOEMATION. 



381 



Leicester ; but a marriage with Leicester was impossible ; and ev- 
ery other union, could she even have bent to one, was denied to 
her by the political difficulties of her position. The one cry of 
bitterness which burst from Elizabeth revealed her terrible sense 
of the solitude of her life. " The Queen of Scots," she cried at the 
birth of James, *' has a fair son, and I am but a barren stock." 
But the loneliness of her position only reflected the loneliness of 
her nature. She stood utterly apart from the world around her; 
sometimes above it, sometimes below it, but never of it. It was 
only on her intellectual side that Elizabeth touched the England 
of her day. All its moral aspects were simply dead to her. It 
was a time when men were being lifted into nobleness by the new 
moral energy which seemed suddenly to pulse through the whole 
people ; when honor and enthusiasm took colors of poetic beauty, 
and religion became a chivalry. But the finer sentiments of the 
men around her touched Elizabeth simply as the fair tints of a pic- 
ture would have touched her. She made her market with equal 
indifference out of the heroism of William of Orange or the big- 
otry of Philip. The noblest aims and lives were only counters on 
her board. She was the one soul in her realm whom the news of 
St. Bartholomew stirred to no lasting thirst for vengeance; and 
while England was thrilling with its triumph over the Armada, 
its queen was coolly grumbling over the cost, and making her 
profit out of the spoiled jDrovisions she had ordered for the fleet 
that saved her. To the voice of gratitude, indeed, she was ab- 
solutely deaf She accepted service such as had been never ren- 
dered to an English sovereign, without a thought of return. Wal- 
singham spent his fortune in saving her life and her throne, and 
she left him to die a beggar. Whatever odium or loss her manoBu- 
vres incurred she flung upon her councilors. To screen her part 
in Mary's death she called on Davison to perish broken-hearted in 
the Tower. But as if by a sti'ange irony, it was to this very want 
of sympathy that she owed some of the grander features of her 
character. If she was without love, she was without hate. She 
cherished no petty resentments ; she never stooped to envy or sus- 
picion of the men who served her. She was indifferent to abuse. 
Her good-humor was never rufi3.ed by the charges of wantonness 
and cruelty with which the Jesuits had filled every court in Eu- 
rope. She was insensible to fear. Her life became at last the 
mark for assassin after assassin, but the thought of peril was the 
one hardest to bring hom,e to her. Even when the Catholic plots 
broke out in her very household, she would listen to no proposals 
for the removal of Catholics from her court. 

It was this moral isolation which told so strangely both for 
good and for evil on her policy toward the Church. No woman 
ever lived who was so totally destitute of the sentiment of relig- 
ion. While the world around her was being swayed more and 
more by theological beliefs and controversies, Elizabeth was abso- 
lutely untouched by them. She was a child o^the Italian Renas- 
cence rather than of the New Learning of Colet or Erasmus, and 
her attitude toward the enthusiasm of her time was that of Loren- 



382 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



zo de' Medici toward Savonarola. Her mind was unruffled by the 
spiritual problems which were vexing the minds around her; to 
Elizabeth, indeed, they were not only unintelligible, they were a 
little ridiculous. She had the same intellectual contempt for the 
coarser superstition of the Romanist as for the bigotry of the Prot- 
estant. She ordered images to be flung into the fire, and quizzed 
the Puritans as " brethren in Christ." But she had no sort of re- 
ligious aversion for either Puritan or Papist. The Protestants 
grumbled at the Catholic nobles whom she admitted to the pres- 
ence. The Catholics grumbled at the Protestant statesmen whom 
she called to her Council-board. But to Elizabeth the arrange- 
ment was the most natural thing in the world. She looked at 
theological differences in a purely political light. She agreed 
with Henry the Fourth that a kingdom was well worth a mass. 
It seemed an obvious thing to her to hold out hopes of conversion 
as a means of deceiving Philip, or to gain a point in negotiation 
by restoring the crucifix to her chapel. The first interest in her 
own mind was the interest of public order, and she never could 
understand how it could fail to be first in every one's mind. Her 
ingenuity set itself to construct a system in whicli ecclesiastical 
unity should not jar against the rights of conscience ; a compro- 
mise which merely required outer " conformity" to the established 
worship while, as she was never weary of repeating, it " left opin- 
ion free." For this purpose she fell back from the very first on 
the system of Henry the Eighth. "I will do," she told the Span- 
ish embassador, " as ray father did." She let the connection with 
Rome drop quietly without any overt act of separation. The first 
work of her Parliament was to undo the work of Mary, to repeal ^ 
the Statutes of Heresy, to dissolve the refounded monasteries, and 
to restore the royal supremacy. At her entry into London Eliza- 
beth kissed the English Bible which the citizens had presented to 
her, and promised " diligently to read therein." Farther she had no 
personal wish to go. A third of the Council and two-thirds of the 
people were as opposed to any radical changes in religion as the 
Queen. Among the gentry the older and wealthier were on the 
conservative side, and only the younger and meaner on the other. 
But it was soon necessary to go farther. If the Protestants were 
the less numerous, they were the abler and the more vigorous par- 
ty ; and the exiles who returned from Geneva brought with them 
a fiercer hatred of Catholicism. Transubstantiation and the mass 
were identified with the fires of Smithfield, while Edward's Prayer- 
book was hallowed by the memories of the martyrs. But in her 
restoration of the English Prayer-book, some slight alterations 
made by Elizabeth in its language showed her wish to conciliate 
the Catholics as far as possible. She had no mind to commit her- 
self to the system of the protectorate. She dropped the words 
" Head of the Church" from the royal title. The Forty-two Arti- 
cles Avere left for some years in abeyance. If Elizabeth had had 
her will, she would have retained the celibacy of the clergy and 
restored the use of crucifixes in the churches. But she was again 
foiled by the increased bitterness of the religious division. The 



VII.] 



THE EEFOBMATION. 



J83 



London mob tore down the crosses in the streets. Her attempt 
to retain the crucifix fell dead before the fierce opposition of the 
Protestant clergy. On the other hand, the Marian bishops, with 
a single exception, discerned the Protestant drift of the changes 
she was making, and bore imprisonment and deprivation rather 
than accept them. But to the mass of the nation the compromise 
of Elizabeth seems to have been fairly acceptable. The whole of 
the clergy, save two hundred, submitted to the Act of Supremacy, 
and adopted the Prayer-book. No marked repugnance to the new 
worship was shown by the people at large, and Elizabeth was able 
to tui-n from questions of belief to the question of order. On one 
point in the treatment of the Church she Avas resolved to make no 
difference. To the end of her reign she remained as bold a plun- 
derer of its wealth as either of her predecessors, and carved out 
rewards for her ministers from the Church-lands with a queenly 
disregard of the rights of property. Lord Burleigh built up the 
estate of the House of Cecil out of tlie demesnes of the see of Pe- 
terborough. The neighborhood of Hatton Garden to Ely Place 
recalls the spoliation of another bishopric in favor of the Queen's 
sprightly chancellor. Her reply to the bishop's protest against 
this robbery showed what Elizabeth meant by her ecclesiastical 
supremacy. "Proud prelate," she wrote, " you know what you 
were before I made you what you are ! If you do not immediate- 
ly comply with my request, by God, I will unfrock you !" But she 
suffered no plunder save her own, and she was earnest for the res- 
toration of order and decency in the outer arrangements of the 
Church. 

Her selection of Parker, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, as 
her agent in its reorganization, was probably dictated by the cor- 
respondence of his character with that of the Queen. Theolog- 
ically the Primate was a moderate man, but he was resolute to re- 
store order in the discipline and worship of the Church, The 
whole machinery of public religion had been thrown out of gear 
by the rapid and radical changes of the past two reigns. In some 
dioceses a third of the parishes were without clergymen. The 
churches themselves were falling into ruin. The majority of the 
parish priests were still Catholic in heart. In the North, indeed, 
they made little disguise of their reactionary tendencies. On 
the other hand, the Protestant minority among the clergy were 
already disgusting the people by their violence and greed. Chap- 
ters had begun to plunder their own estates by leases and fines, 
and by felling timber. The marriages of the clergy were a per- 
petual scandal, a scandal which was increased when the gorgeous 
vestments of the old worship were cut up into gowns and bodices 
for the priests' wives. The new services became scenes of utter 
disorder, where the clergy wore what dress they pleased, and the 
communicant stood or sat as he liked ; while the old altars were 
broken down, and the communion-table was often a bare board 
upon trestles. The people, naturally enough, were found to be 
" utterly devoid of religion," and came to church " as to a May- 
game." To the difficulties which Parker found in the temper of 



Sec. m. 



384 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the Reformers and their opponents, new difficulties were added 
by the freaks of the Queen. If she had no convictions, she had 
tastes ; and her taste revolted from the bareness of Protestant 
ritual, and, above all, from the marriage of priests. " Leave that 
alone," she shouted to Dean Nowell from the royal closet as he 
denounced the use of images; "stick to your text, Master Dean; 
leave that alone !" Parker, however, was firm in resisting the 
introduction of the crucifix or of celibacy, and Elizabeth showed 
her resentment at his firmness by an insult to his wife. Married 
ladies Avere addressed at this time as " Madam," unmarried ladies 
as "Mistress;" and when Mrs. Parker advanced at the close of a 
sumptuous entertainment at Lambeth to take leave of the Queen, 
Elizabeth feigned a momentary hesitation. "Madam," she said 
at last, "I may not call you, and Mistress I am loath to call you; 
however, I thank you for your good cheer." But freaks of this 
sort had little real influence on the Queen's policy, or on the steady 
support which she gave to the Primate in his work of order. The 
vacant sees were filled for the most part with learned and able 
men ; the plunder of the Church by the nobles was checked ; and 
England was settling quietly doAvn again in religious peace, when 
a prohibition from Rome forbade the presence of Catholics at the 
new worship. The order was widely obeyed, and the obedience 
was accepted by Elizabeth as a direct act of defiance. Heavy 
"fines for recusancy," levied on all who absented themselves from 
church, became a constant source of supply to the royal exchequer. 
Meanwhile Parker was laboring for a uniformity of faith and wor- 
ship among the clergy. Of the Forty-two Articles enjoined by 
Edward, thirty-nine were restored as a standard of belief, and a^ 
commission was opened by the Queen's order at Lambeth, with 
the Primate at its head, to enforce the Act of Uniformity in all 
matters of public worship. At one critical moment the extreme 
Protestants took alarm, chui'ch-wardens in London refused to pro- 
vide surplices, and for a time it was necessary to suspend the more 
recalcitrant ministers. But the work of the commission was too 
clearly needed to be permanently resisted ; the more extreme 
Protestants were suffered to preach by connivance ; and through- 
out the Church at large some kind of decent order was restored. 

The settlement of religion, however, was the least pressing of 
the cares which met Elizabeth as she mounted the throne. The 
country was drained by war; yet she could only free herself from 
war, and from the dependence on Spain which it involved, by 
acquiescing in the loss of Calais. But though peace had been won 
by the sacrifice, France remained openly hostile; the Dauphin and 
his wife, Mary Stuart, assumed the arms and style of King and 
Queen of England, and their pretensions became a source of im- 
mediate danger through the presence of a French army in Scot- 
land. To understand, however, what had taken place there, we 
must cursorily review the past history, of the Northern kingdom. 
From the moment when England finally abandoned the fruitless 
efibrt to subdue it, the story of Scotland had been a miserable 
one. Whatever peace might be concluded, a sleepless dread of 



VII.] 



THE EEFORMATION. 



38o 



the old danger from the South tied the country to an alliance with 
France, which dragged it into the vortex of the Hundred Years' 
War. But after the great defeat and capture of David in the 
field of Neville's Cross, the struggle died down on both sides into 
marauding forays and battles, like those of Otterburn and Homil- 
don Hill, in which alternate victories were won by the feudal lords 
of the Scotch or English border. The ballad of " Chevy Chase" 
brings home to us the spirit of the contest, the daring and defiance 
which stirred Sidney's heart " like a trumpet ;" but its effect on the 
internal development of Scotland was utterly ruinous. The houses 
of Douglas and of March, which it had raised into supremacy, only 
interrupted their strife with England to battle fiercely with one 
another or to coerce the King. The power of the Crown sank, in 
fact, into insignificance under the earlier sovereigns of the line of 
Stuart, which had succeeded to the throne on the extinction of the 
male line of Bruce. Invasions and civil feuds not only arrested, but 
even rolled back, the national industry and prosperity. The coun- 
try was a chaos of disorder and misrule, in which the peasant and 
the trader were the victims of feudal outrage. The border became 
a lawless land, where robbery and violence reigned utterly with- 
out check. So pitiable seemed the state of the kingdom, that the 
clans of the Highlands drew together at last to swoop upon it as 
a certain prey ; but the common peril united the factions of the 
nobles, and the victory of Harlaw saved the Lowlands from the 
rule of the Celt. A great name at last broke the line of its worth- 
less kings. Schooled by a long captivity in England, James the 
First returned to his realm to be the ablest of her rulers, as he was 
the first of her poets. In the twelve years of a short but wonder- 
ful reign, justice and order were restored for a while, the Parlia- 
ment organized on the English model, the clans of the Highlands 
assailed in their own fastnesses and reduced to swear fealty to the 
" Saxon" king. He turned to assail the great houses, but feudal 
violence was still too strong for the hand of the law, and a band 
of ruffians who had burst into the royal chamber left the King life- 
less, with sixteen stabs in his body. The death of James was the 
signal for an open struggle for supremacy between the House of 
Douglas and the Crown, which lasted through half a century. 
Order, however, crept gradually in ; the exile of the Douglases 
left the Scottish monarchs supreme in the Lowlands ; while their 
dominion over the Highlands was secured by the ruin of the 
Lords of the Isles. The fatal contest with. England ceased with 
the accession of the House of Tudor; and the policy of Henry the 
Seventh bound for a time the two kingdoms together by bestow- 
ing the hand of his daughter Margaret on the Scottish king. The 
union was soon dissolved, however, by his son's claims of suprem- 
acy, and by the intrigues of "Wolsey; war broke out anew, and 
the terrible defeat and death of James the Fourth at Flodden Field 
involved his realm in the turbulence and misrule of a minority. 
The actual reign of his successor, James the Fifth, had hardly be- 
gun when his sympathies with the English Catholics aided the 
ambition of Somerset in plunging the two countries into a fresh 

25 



386 



HISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



struggle. His defeat at Solway Moor brought the young King 
broken-hearted to his grave. "It came with a lass, and it will go 
with a lass," he cried, as they brought him on his death-bed the 
news of Mary Stuart's birth. The hand of his infant successor at 
once became the subject of rivalry between England and France. 
Had Mary, as Somerset desired, been wedded to Edward the Sixth, 
the whole destinies of Europe might have been changed by the 
union of the two realms ; but the recent bloodshed had imbit- 
tered Scotland, and the high-handed way in which the English 
statesmen had pushed their marriage project completed the breach, 
Somerset's invasion and victory at Pinkie Clough only enabled 
Mary of Guise, the French wife of James the Fifth, who had be- 
come regent of the realm at his death, to induce the Scotch es- 
tates to consent to the union of her child with the heir of the 
French Crown, the Dauphin Francis, From that moment, as we 
have seen, the claims of the Scottish Queen on the English throne 
became so formidable a danger as to drive Mary Tudor to her 
marriage with Philip of Spain. But the danger became a still 
greater one on the accession of Elizabeth, whose legitimacy no 
Catholic acknowledged, and whose religious attitude tended to 
throw the Catholic party into her rival's hands. 

In spite of the peace with France, therefore, Francis and Maiy 
persisted in their pretensions; and a French force which occupied 
Leith was slowly inci'eased, with the connivance of Mary of Guise. 
The appearance of this force on the border was intended to bring 
about a Catholic rising. But the hostility between France and 
Spain bound Philip, for the moment, to the support of Elizabeth ; 
and his influence over the Catholics secured quiet for a time. The 
Queen, too, played with their hopes of a religious reaction by talk 
of her own coTiversion,by the reintroduction of the crucifix into 
her chapel, and by plans for her marriage with an Austrian and 
Catholic prince. Meanwhile she parried the blow in Scotland it- 
self, where the Reformation had just begun to gain ground, by se- 
cretly encouraging the " Lords of the Congregation," as the no- 
bles who headed the Protestant party were styled, to rise against 
the Regent. Elizabeth's dijDlomacy gained her a year, and her 
matchless activity used the year to good purpose. Order was re- 
stored throughout England, the Church was reorganized, the debts 
of the Crown were paid off, the treasury recruited, a navy created, 
and a force was ready for action in the North, when the defeat of 
her Scotch adherents forced her at last to throw aside the mask. 
As yet she stood almost alone in her self-reliance. Spain, while 
supporting oer, believed her ruin to be certain ; France despised 
her chances ; her very Council was in despair. The one minister 
in whom she really confided was Cecil, the youngest and boldest 
of her advisers, and even Cecil trembled for her success. But lies 
and hesitation were no sooner put aside, than the Queen's vigor 
and tenacity came fairly into play. Wynter, the English admiral, 
appeared suddenly on the Forth, and forced D'Oysel, the French 
commander, to fall back upon Leith at the moment when he was 
on the point of crushing the Lords of the Congregation. France 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



387 



was taken by surprise, and could give little help save by negotia- 
tion ; but Elizabeth refused to accept any terms save the with- 
drawal of every Frenchman, and the abandonment of the claim 
of Mary Stuart upon her crown. On the refusal of these terms, 
Lord Grey moved over the border with 8000 men to join the 
Lords of the Congi-egation in the siege of Leith. The Scots, in- 
deed, gave little aid ; and Philip, in his jealousy of Elizabeth's 
sudden strength, demanded the abandonment of the enterprise, 
while an assault on the town signally failed. But Elizabeth was 
immovable. Famine did its work better than the sword; and in 
the Treaty of Edinburgh the French bought the liberation of their 
army by a pledge to abandon the kingdom, and by an admission 
of the Queen's title to her throne ; the government of Scotland 
Avas placed in the hands of a council of its lords ; and the provision 
which secured for the Protestants the free exercise of their relig- 
ion bound to Elizabeth a party which would be of service to her 
in any danger from the North. 



Section IV.— England and Mary Stuart. 1560—1572. 

[^Authorities. — To those metiSoned in the previous section, we may add Strype's 
"Lives of Grindal and Whitgift,"the French dispatches of Fe'nelon, Howell's "State 
Trials ;" and for the Dutch revolt Motley's " History of the United Netherlands."] 



The issue of the Scotch war revealed suddenly to Europe the 
vigor of Elizabeth, and the real strength of her throne. She had 
freed herself from the control of Philip, she had defied France, she 
had averted the danger from the North by the creation of an En- 
glish party among the nobles of Scotland. The same use of re- 
ligious divisions soon gave her a similar check on the hostility of 
France. The Huguenots, as the French Protestants were called, 
had become a formidable party under the guidance of the Admiral 
Coligny ; and the defeat of their rising against the family of the 
Guises, who stood at the head of the French Catholics and were 
supreme at the Court of Francis and Mary, threw them on the sup- 
port and alliance of Elizabeth. But if the decisive outbreak of 
the great religious struggle, so long looked for between the Old 
Faith and the New, gave Elizabeth strength abroad, it weakened 
her at home. Her Catholic subjects lost all hope of her conver- 
sion as they saw the Queen allying herself with the Scotch lords 
and the French Huguenots ; her hopes of a religious compromise 
in matters of worship were broken by the issue of a Papal brief 
which forbade attendance at the English service ; and Philip of 
Spain, freed like herself from the fear of France by its religious 
divisions, no longer held the English Catholics in check. He was 
preparing, in fact, to take a new political stand as the pati'on of 
Catholicism throughout the world ; and his troops were directed 
to support the Guises in the civil war Avhich broke out after the 
death of Francis the Second, and to attack the heretics wherever 
they might find them. " Religion," he told Elizabeth, " was being 



388 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



made a cloak foi- anarchy and revolution." It was at the moment 
when the last hopes of the English Catholics were dispelled by 
the Queen's refusal to take part in the Council of Trent, that 
Mary Stuart, whom the death of her husband had left a stranger 
in France, landed suddenly at Leith. Girl as she was, and she 
was only nineteen, she was hardly inferior in intellectual power to 
Elizabeth herself, while in fire and grace and brilliancy of temper 
she stood high above her. She brought with her the voluptuous 
refinement of the Fi-ench Renascence; she would lounge for days 
in bed, and rise only at night for dances and music. But her 
frame was of iron, and incapable of fatigue ; she galloped ninety 
miles after her last defeat without a pause save to change horses. 
She loved risk and adventure and the ring of arms; as she rode 
in a foray against Huntley, the grim swordsman beside her heard 
her wish she was a man, " to know what life it was to lie all night 
in the field, or to watch on the cawsey with a Glasgow buckler 
and a broadsword." But in the closet she was as cool and astute 
a politician as Elizabeth herself; with plans as subtle, but of a far 
wider and grander range than the Queen's. " Whatever policy is 
in all the chief and best practiced heads of France," wrote an En- 
glish envoy, " whatever craft, falsehood, and deceit is in all the 
subtle brains of Scotland, is either fresh in this woman's memory, 
or she can fetch it out with a wet finger." Her beautj^, her ex- 
quisite grace of manner, her generosity of temper and warmth of 
afiection, her frankness of speech, her sensibility, her gayety, h^r 
womanly tears, her man-like courage, the play and freedom of her 
nature, the flashes of poetry that broke from her at every intense 
moment of her life, flung a spell over friend or foe which has only 
deepened with the lapse of years. Even to KnoUys, the sternest 
Puritan of his day, she seemed in her captivity to be " a notable 
woman." " She seemeth to regard no ceremonious honor besides 
the acknowledgment of her estate royal. She showeth a dispo- 
sition to speak much, to be bold, to be pleasant, to be very famil- 
ial*. She showeth a great desire to be avenged on her enemies. 
She showeth a readiness to expose herself to all perils in hope of 
victory. She desires much to hear of hardiness and valiancy, 
commending by name all approved liiardy men of her country 
though they be her enemies, and she cpncealeth no cowardice 
evenin her friends." As yet men knew nothing of the stern big- 
otry, the intensity of passion, which lay beneath the winning sur- 
face of Mary's womanhood. But they at once recognized her po- 
litical ability. She had seized eagerly on the new strength which 
was given her by her husband's death. Her cause was no longer 
hampered, either in Scotland or in England, by a national jealousy 
of French interference. It was with a resolve to break the league 
between Elizabeth and the Scotch Protestants, to unite her own 
realm around her, and thus to give a firm base for her intrigues 
among the English Catholics, that Mary landed at Leith. The 
efiect of her presence was marvelous. Her personal fascination 
revived the national loyalty, and swept all Scotland to her feet. 
Knox, the greatest f.nd sternest of the Calvinistic preachers, alone 



VII.] 



TRE EEFOBMATION. 



389 



withstood her spell. The rough Scotch nobles owned that there 
was in Mary " some enchantment whereby men are bewitched." 
A promise of religious toleration united her subjects as one man 
in support of the temperate claim which she advanced to be 
named Elizabeth's successor in Parliament. But the question of 
the succession, like the question of her marriage, was with Eliza- 
beth a question of life and death. Her wedding with a Cath- 
olic or a Protestant suitor would have been equally the end of 
her system of balance and national union, a signal for the re- 
volt of the party which she disappointed, and for the triumphant 
dictation of the party which she satisfied. "If a Catholic prince 
come here," a Spanish embassador wrote while pressing an Aus- 
trian marriage, "the first mass he attends will be the signal for a 
revolt." To name a Protestant successor from the House of Suf- 
folk would have driven every Catholic to insurrection. To name 
Mary was to stir Protestantism to a rising of despair, and to leave 
Elizabeth at the mercy of every fanatical assassin who wished to 
clear the way for a Catholic ruler. "I am not so foolish," was the 
Queen's reply to Mary, " as to hang a winding-sheet before my 
eyes." But the pressure on her was great, and Mary looked to the 
triumph of Catholicism in France to increase the pressure. It was 
this which drove Elizabeth to listen to the cry of the Huguenots at 
the moment when they were yielding to the strength of the Guises. 
Hate Avar as she might, the instinct of self-preservation dragged 
her into the great struggle; and in spite of the menaces of Philip, 
money and seven thousand men were sent to the aid of the Prot- 
estants under Conde. But a fatal overthrow of the Huguenot 
army at Dreux left the Guises masters of France, and brought the 
danger to the very doors of England. The hopes of the English 
Catholics rose higher, and the measures of the Parliament showed 
its apprehensions of civil war. " There has been enough of words," 
said the Puritan Sir Francis Knollys; "it were time to draw 
sword ;" and the sword was drawn in a test act, the first in a 
series of penal statutes which weighed upon the English Catholics 
for two hundred years, by which the oath of allegiance and abju- 
ration of the temporal authority of the Pope was exacted from all 
holders of office, lay or spiritual, within the realm, with the excep- 
tion of peers. At this crisis, however, Elizabeth was able, as usual, 
to "count much on fortune." The assassination of the Duke of 
Guise broke up his party ; a policy of moderation and balance pre- 
vailed at the French Court ; and Catharine of Medicis, who was 
now supreme, was parted from Mary Stuart by a bitter hate. 

The Queen's good luck was checkered by a merited humiliation. 
She had sold her aid to the Huguenots in their hour of distress at 
the price of the surrender of Havre, and Havre was again wrest- 
ed from her by the reunion of the French parties. But she had 
secured a year's respite in her anxieties ; and Mary was utterly 
foiled in her plan for bringing the pressure of a united Scotland, 
backed by France, to bear upon her rival. But the defeat only 
threw on her a yet more formidable scheme. She was weary of the 
mask of religious indifference which her policy had forced her to ^ 



390 



SISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



wear with the view of securing the general support of her subjects. 
She resolved now to appeal to the English Catholics on the ground 
of Catholicism. Their sympathies had as yet been divided. Next 
to Mary in the hereditary line of succession stood Henry Stuart, 
Lord Darnley, the son of the Countess of Lennox, and grandson of 
Margaret Tudor by her second marriage with the Earl of Angus, 
as Mary was her grandchild by Margaret's first marriage with 
James the Fourth. The Lennoxes had remained rigid Catholics, 
and it was npon their succession rather than on that of the Queen 
of Scots that the hopes of the English Catholics had till now been 
fixed. It was by a match with Henry Stuart that Mary deter- 
mined to unite the forces of Catholicism. With wonderful subtle- 
ty she succeeded in dispelling Elizabeth's suspicions, while draw- 
ing the boy and his mother to her Court ; and the threat of war 
with which the English Queen strove too late to prevent the mar- 
riage only succeeded in hastening it. The match was regarded 
on all sides as a challenge to Protestantism. Philip, who had till 
now regarded Mary's pretense of toleration and her hopes from 
France with equal suspicion, was at last warm in commending her 
cause. " She is the one gate," he owned, " through Avhich religion 
can be restored in England. All the rest are closed." The Lords 
of the Congregation woke with a start from their confidence in the 
Queen, and her half- brother. Lord James Stuart, better known 
later on as Earl of Murray, mustered his Protestant confederates. 
But their revolt was hardly declared when Mary marched on them 
with pistols in her belt, and drove their leaders helplessly over the 
border. Her boldness and energy cowed Elizabeth into the mean- 
est dissimulation, while the announcement of her pregnancy soon 
gave her a strength which swept aside Philip's counsels of caution 
and delay. " With the help ot' God and of your Holiness," Mary 
wrote to the Pope, "I will leap over the wall." Rizzio, an Italian 
who had counseled the marriage, still remained her adviser, and 
the daring advice he gave fell in with her natural temper. She 
had resolved in the coming Parliament to restore Catholicism in 
Scotland. France in a fresh revolution fell again under the Guises, 
and offei-ed her support. The English Catholics of the North pre- 
pared to revolt as soon* as she was ready to aid them. No such 
danger had ever threatened Elizabeth as this, but every thing hung 
on the will of a woman whose passions were even stronger than 
her will. Mary had staked all on her union with Darnley, and yet 
only a few months had passed since her wedding-day when men 
saw that she "hated the King." The boy turned out a dissolute, 
insolent husband; and Mary's scornful refusal of his claim of the 
" crown matrimonial," a refusal probably inspired by her Italian 
minister Rizzio, drove his jealousy to madness. At the very mo- 
ment when the Queen revealed the extent of her schemes by the 
attainder of Mui'ray and his adherents, and by her dismissal of the 
English embassador, the young King, followed by his kindred, the 
Douglases, burst into her chamber, dragged Rizzio from her pres- 
ence, and stabbed, him brutally on the stair-head. The darker feat- 
. ures of Mary's character were now to develop themselves. Darn- 



VII.] 



THE BEFOEMATION. 



391 



ley, keen as was her thirst for vengeance on him, was needful as yet 
to her revenge on his abettors, and to the triumph of her political 
aims. She masked her hatred beneath a show of affection which 
severed the wretched boy from his fellow-conspirators ; then, fling- 
ing herself into Dunbar, she marched in triumj^h on Edinburgh at 
the head of eight thousand men, while the Douglases and the Prot- 
estant lords who had shrunk from joining Murray fled to En- 
gland or their strongholds. Her intrigues Avith the English Cath- 
olics she had never interrupted, and her Court was full of Papists 
from the Northern counties. " Your actions," Elizabeth wix)te in 
a sudden break of fierce candor, "are as full of venom as your 
words are of honey." The birth of her child, the future James the 
Sixth of Scotland and First of England, doubled Mary's strength. 
" Her friends were so increased," an embassador wrote to her from 
England, " that many whole shires were ready to rebel, and their 
captains named by election of the nobility." However exagger- 
ated such news may have been, the anxiety of the Parliament 
which met at this crisis proved that the danger was felt to be 
real. The Houses saw but one way of providing against it; and 
they renewed their appeal for the Queen's marriage, and for a 
settlement of the succession. As we have seen, both of these 
measures involved even greater dangers than they averted ; but 
Elizabeth stood alone in her resistance to them. Even Cecil's 
fears for "the religion" proved greater than his statesmanship; 
and he pressed for a Protestant successor. But the Queen stood 
firm. The jjromise to marry, which she gave after a furious 
burst of anger, she resolved to evade as she had evaded it before. 
But the quarrel with the Commons which followed on her pro- 
hibition of any debate on the succession, a quarrel to which we 
shall recur at a later time, hit Elizabeth hard. It was " secret 
foes at home," she told the Commons as their quarrel passed away 
in a warm reconciliation, who " thought to work me that mischief 
which never foreign enemies could bring to pass, which is the 
hatred of my Commons. Do you think that either I am so un- 
mindful of your surety by succession, wherein is all my care, or 
that I went about to break your liberties? No ! it never was my 
meaning ; but to stay you before you fell into the ditch." It was 
impossible for her, however, to explain the real reasons for her 
course, and the dissolution of the Parliament left her face to face 
with a new national discontent added to the ever-deepening peril 
from Tv'ithout. 

One terrible event suddenly struck light through the gatliering 
clouds. Mary had used Darnley as a tool to effect the ruin of his 
confederates and to further her policy, but she had never forgiven 
him. The miserable boy was left to wander in disgrace and neg- 
lect from place to place; while Mary's purpose of vengeance was 
quickened by Darnley's complaints and intrigues, and yet more 
by her passion for the Earl of Both well, the boldest, as he was the 
most worthless, of the younger nobles. Ominous words dropped 
from her lips. " Unless she were freed of him some way," she said 
at last, " she had no pleasure to live." Humors of an approaching 



392 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



divorce were followed by darker whispers among the lords. The 
terrible secret of the deed which followed is still wrapped in a 
cloud of doubt and mystery, which will probably never be wholly 
dispelled ; but taken simply by themselves the facts have a sig- 
nificance which it is impossible to explain away. The Queen's 
hatred to Darnley passed all at once into demonstrations of the 
old affection. He had fallen sick with vice and misery, and she 
visited him on his sick-bed, and persuaded him to follow her to 
Edinburgh. She visited him again in a ruinous and lonely house 
without the walls, in which he was lodged by her order, kissed 
him as she bade him farewell, and rode gayly back to a wedding 
dance at Holyrood. Two hours after midnight an awful explosion 
shook the city; and the burghers rushed out from the gates to 
find the house of Kirk o' Field destroyed, and Darnley's body 
dead beside the ruins, though " with no sign of fire on it." The 
murder was undoubtedly the deed of Both well. His servants, it 
Avas soon known, had stored the powder beneath the King's bed- 
chamber; and the Earl had watched without the walls till the 
deed was done. But, in spite of gathering suspicion, and of the 
charge of murder made formally against him by Lord Lennox, no 
sei'ious steps were taken to iiivestigate the crime; and a rumor 
that Mary purposed to marry the murderer drove her friends to 
despair. Her agent in England wrote to her that "if she married 
that man she would lose the favor of God, her own reputation, and 
the hearts of all England, Ireland, and Scotland." But every 
stronghold in the kingdom was soon placed in Bothwell's hands, 
and this step was the prelude to a trial and acquittal which the 
overwhelming force of his followers in Edinburgh turned into a bit-, 
ter mockery. The Earl was married, but a shameless suit for his 
divorce removed this last obstacle to his ambition ; and his seiz- 
ure of the Queen as she rode to Linlithgow was followed three 
weeks later by their union at Dunbar. In a month more all was 
over. The horror at such a marriage with a man fresh from her 
husband's blood drove the whole nation to revolt. Its nobles, 
Catholic as well as Protestant, gathered in arms at Stirling ; and 
their entrance into Edinburgh roused the capital into insurrection. 
Mary and the Earl advanced Avith a fair force to Seton to encount- 
er the lords ; but their men refused to fight, and Bothwell gal- 
loped off into lifelong exile, while the Queen was brought back to 
Edinburgh in a frenzy of despair, tossing back wild words of de- 
fiance to the curses of the crowd. From Edinburgk she Avas car- 
ried a prisoner to the fortress of Lochleven ; and her brother, the 
Earl of Murray, was recalled from banishment to accept the re- 
gency of the realm. 

For the moment England was saved, but the ruin of Mary's 
hopes had not come one instant too soon. The great conflict be- 
tween the two religions, which had begun in France, was slowly 
Avidening into a general struggle over the Avhole face of Europe. 
For four years the balanced policy of Catharine of Medicis had 
wrested a truce from both Catholics and Huguenots, but Conde 
and the Guises again vose in arms, each side eager to find its profit 



VIL] 



THE REFORMATION. 



393 



in the new troubles which now broke out in Flanders. For the 
long persecution of the Protestants there, and the unscrupulous 
invasion of the constitutional liberties of the provinces by Philip 
of Spain, had at last stirred the Netherlands to revolt ; and the 
insurrection was seized by Philip as a pretext for dealing a blow 
he had long meditated at the growing heresy of tliis portion of his 
dominions. At the moment when Mary entered Lochleven, the 
Duke of Alva was starting with a veteran army on his march to 
the Low Countries; and with his easy triumph over their insur- 
gent forces began the terrible series of outrages and massacres 
which have made his name infamous in history. No event could 
be more embarrassing to Elizabeth than the arrival of Alva in 
Flanders. His extirpation of heresy/ there Avould prove the pre- 
lude for his co-operation with the iGuises in the extirpation of 
heresy in France. Without counting, too, this future danger, the 
mere triumph of Catholicism, and the presence of a Catholic army, 
in a country so closely connected with England at once revived 
the dreams of a Catholic rising against her throne; while the news 
of Alva's massacres stirred in everyone of her Protestant subjects 
a thirst for revenge which it was hard to hold in check. Yet to 
strike a blow at Alva was impossible, for Antwerp was the great 
mart of English trade, and its master had our rising commerce in 
his power. A final stoppage of the trade with Flanders would 
have broken half the merchants in London. Every day was deep- 
ening the perplexities of Elizabeth, when Mary- succeeded in mak- 
ing her escape from Lochleven. Defeated at Langsyde, where the 
energy of Murray promptly crushed the rising of the Hamiltons 
in her support, slie abandoned all hope of Scotland; and changing 
her designs with the rapidity of genius, she pushed in a light boat 
across the Solway, and was safe before evening fell in the castle 
of Carlisle. Though her power over her own kingdom was gone, 
she saw that imprisonment and suffering had done much to wipe 
away her shame in the hearts of the Catholic party across the En- 
glish border, kindled as«they were to new hopes of triumph by 
the victories of Alva. But the presence of Alva in Flanders was 
a far less peril than the presence of Mary in Carlisle. To retain 
her in England was to furnish a centre for revolt; Mary herself, 
indeed, threatened that " if they kept her prisoner they should 
have enough to do with her." Her ostensible demand was for En- 
glish aid in her restoration to the throne, or for a free passage to 
France ; but compliance with the last request would have given 
the Guises a terrible weapon against Elizabeth, and have insured 
a new French intervention in Scotland, while to restore her by 
arms to the crown she had lost without some public investigation 
of the dark crimes laid to her charge was impossible. So eager, 
however, was Elizabeth to get rid of the pressing peril of her pres- 
ence in England, that Mary's refusal to submit to any trial only 
drove her to fresh devices for her restoration. She urged upon 
Murray the suppression of the graver charges, and upon Mary the 
leaving of Murray in actual possession of the royal power as the 
price of her return. Neither, however, would listen to terms which 



394 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



sacriliced both to Elizabeth's self-interest; the Regent formally 
advanced charges of murder and adultery against the Queen, 
while Mary refused either to answer, or to abdicate in favor of 
her infant son. The triumph, indeed, of her bold policy w'as best 
advanced, as the Queen of Scots had no doubt foreseen, by simple 
inaction. Elizabeth "had the Avolf by the ears," while the fierce 
contest which Alva's cruelty roused in the Netherlands was firing 
the temper of the two great parties in England. 

In the Court, as in the countrj^, the forces of progress and of 
resistance stood at last in sharp and declared opposition to each 
other. Cecil, at the head of the Protestants, demanded a general 
alliance with the Protestant churches throughout Europe, a war 
in Flanders against Alva, and the unconditional surrender of Mary 
to her Scotch subjects for the punishment she deserved. The 
Catholics, on the other hand, backed by the mass of the conserva- 
tive party with the Duke of Norfolk at its head, and supported 
by the wealthier merchants, who dreaded the ruin of the Flemish 
trade, were as earnest in demanding the dismissal of Cecil and the 
Protestants from the Council-board, a steady peace with Spain, and, 
though less openly, a recognition of Mary's succession. Elizabeth 
was driven to temporize as before. She refused Cecil's counsels; 
but she sent money and arms to Conde, and hampered Alva by 
seizing treasure on its way to him, and by pushing the quarrel 
even to a temporary embargo on shipping either side the sea. 
She refused the counsels of Norfolk; but she would hear nothing 
of a declaration of war, or give any judgment on the charges 
against the Scottish Queen, or recognize the accession of James 
in her stead. The patience of the great Catholic lords, however,^ 
was at last exhausted ; and the effect of Mary's presence in En- 
gland Avas seen in the rising of the houses of Neville and of Percy. 
The entry of the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland into 
Durham cathedral proved the signal for revolt. The rising was 
a purely Catholic rising ; the Bible and Prayer-book were torn to 
pieces, and mass said once more at the alt«r of St. Cuthbert, before 
the Earls pushed on to Doncaster with an army which soon swelled 
to thousands of men. Their cry was "to reduce all causes of re- 
ligion to the eld custom and usage ;" and the Earl of Sussex, her 
general in the North, wrote frankly to Elizabeth that "there were 
not ten gentlemen in Yorkshire that did allow [approve] her pro- 
ceedings in the cause of religion." But he was as loyal as he was 
frank, and held York stoutly, while the Queen deprived the revolt 
of its most efiective weapon by Mary's hasty removal to a new 
prison at Coventry. The storm, however, broke as rapidly as it 
had gathered. The mass of the Catholics throughout the country 
made no sign; and the Earls no sooner halted irresolute in pres- 
ence of this unexpected inaction than their array caught the pan- 
ic and dispersed. Northumberland and Westmoreland fled, and 
were followed in their flight by Lord Dacre of Naworth, the 
greatest noble of the border; while their miserable adherents paid 
for their disloyalty in bloodshed and ruin. The 'ruthless measures 
of repression which closed this revolt were the first breach in the 



VII.] 



THE BEFOEMATION. 



395 



clemency of Elizabetli's rule, but they were signs of terroi" which 
were not lost on her opponents. It was the general inaction of 
the Catholics which had foiled the hopes of the Northern Earls ; 
and Rome now did its best to stir them to activity by issuing a 
bull of excommunication and deposition against the Queen, which 
was found nailed in a spirit of ironical defiance on the Bishop of 
London's door. The Catholics of the North withdrew stubbornly 
fi'om the Anglican worship ; while Mary, who had been foiled in 
new hopes of her restoration, which had opened through the assas- 
sination of the Regent Murray, by the refusal of the Scotch lords 
to accept her, fell back on her old line of intrigue in England it- 
self. From the defeated Catholics she turned to the body of con- 
servative peers at whose head stood the Duke of Norfolk, a man 
weak in temper, but important as the representative of the gen- 
eral reluctance to advance further in a purely Protestant direc- 
tion. His dreams of a ijiarriage with Mary were detected by Ce- 
cil, and checked by a short sojourn in the Tower; but his corre- 
spondence with the Queen was renewed on his release, and ended 
in an appeal to Philip for the intervention of a Spanish army. At 
the head of this a]ipeal stood the name of Mary ; while Norfolk's 
name was followed by those of many lords of " the old blood," as 
the prouder peers styled themselves; and the significance of the 
request was heightened by gatherings of Catholic refugees at Ant- 
werp round the leaders of the Northern revolt. Enough of these 
conspiracies was discovered to rouse a fresh' ardor in the men- 
aced Protestants. The Parliament met to pass an act of attainder 
against the Northern Earls, and to declare the introduction of Pa- 
pal bulls into the country an act of high treason. The rising in- 
dignation against Marj'-, as " the daughter of Debate, who discord 
fell doth sow," was shown in a statute, which declared any person 
who laid claim to the crown during the Queen's lifetime incapa- 
ble of ever succeeding to it. The disafiTection of the Catholics was 
met by imposing on all magistrates and public ofiicers the obliga- 
tion of subscribing to the Articles of Faith, a measure which in 
fact transferred the administration of justice and public order to 
their Protestant opponents. Meanwhile Norfolk's treason ripened 
into an elaborate plot. Philip had promised aid should the revolt 
actually break out ; but the clue to these negotiations had long 
been in Cecil's hands, and before a single step could be taken to- 
ward tlie practical realization of his schemes of ambition, they 
were foiled by Norfolk's arrest. With his death and that of 
Northumberland, who followed him to the scaiFold, the dread of 
a revolt within the realm, which had so long hung over England, 
passed quietly away. The failure of the two attempts not only 
showed the weakness and disunion of the party of discontent 
and reaction, but it revealed the weakness of all party feeling 
before the rise of a national temper which was springing natu- 
rally out of the peace of Elizabeth's reign, and which a growing 
sense of danger to the order and prosperity around it was fast 
turning into a passionate loyalty to the Queen. It was not mere- 
ly against Cecil's watchfulness or Elizabeth's cunning that Mary 



396 



HISTORY OF TSE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



and Philip and the Percies dashed themselves in vain ; it was 
aofainst a new England. 



Section V. — Tlie I^ugland of £lizabetli. 

{Authorities. — For our constitutional history during this period we have D'Ewes's 
Journals, and Tovvnshend's "Journal of Parliamentary Proceedings, from 1580 to 
1601," the first detailed account we possess of the proceedings of our Ilouse of Com- 
mons. The general survey given by Hallam ("Constitutional History") is as ju- 
dicious as it is able. For trade, etc., we may consult Macpherson's "Annals of Com- 
merce," and the section on it in the "Pictorial History of England." Some valuable 
details are added by Mr. Froude. The general literary history is given by Crailc 
("History of English Literature"), who has devoted a separate work to Spenser 
and his times; and the sober but narrow estimate of Mr. Hallam ("Literary His- 
tory") may be contrasted with the more brilliant though less balanced comments of 
M. Taine on the writers of the Renascence.] 



"I have desired," Elizabeth said pvoudly to her Parliament, " to 
have the obedience of my subjects by love, and not by corajDul- 
sion." It was a love fairly won by justice and good government. 
Buried as she seemed in foreign negotiations and intrigues, Eliza- 
beth was above all an English sovereign. She devoted herself 
ably and energetically to the task of civil administration. She 
had hardly mounted the throne, indeed, when she faced th« prob- 
lem of social discontent. Time, and the natural development of 
new branches of industry, were working quietly for the relief of 
the glutted labor-market ; but, as we have seen under the Pro- 
tectorate, a vast mass of disorder still existed in England, which 
found a constant ground of resentment in the inclosures and evic-' 
tions which accompanied the progress of agricultural change. It 
was on this host of "broken men" that every rebellion could count 
for support ; their mere existence indeed was an encouragement to 
civil war, while in peace their presence was felt m the insecurity 
of life and property, in gangs of marauders which held whole 
counties in terror, and in " sturdy beggars" who,, stripped travel- 
ers on the road. Under Elizabeth, as under her predecessors, the 
terrible measures of repression, Avhose useless^iess More had in 
vain pointed out, went jDitilessly on : Ave find the magistrates of 
Somersetshire capturing a gang of a hundred at a stroke, hanging 
fifty at once on the gallows, and complaining bitterly to the Coun- 
cil of the necessity for waiting till the assizes before they could 
enjoy the spectacle of the fifty others hanging beside them. But 
the issue of a royal commission to inquire into the Avhole matter 
enabled the Government to deal with the difSculty in a wiser and 
more effectual way. The old powers to enforce labor on the idle, 
and settlement on the vagrant class, were continued ; but a dis- 
tinction was for the first time drawn between these and the im- 
potent and destitute persons who had been confounded with them ; 
and each town^ and parish Avas held responsible for the relief of 
its indigent and disabled poor, as it had long been responsible for 
the employment of able-bodied mendicants. When voluntary 
contributions proved insufficient for this purpose, the justices in 



VIL] 



THE BEFOBMATION. 



397 



sessions were enabled by statute to assess all persons in town or 
parish who refused to contribute in proportion to their ability. 
The principles embodied in these measures, the principle of local 
responsibility for local distress, and that of a distinction between 
the pauper and the vagabond, were more clearly defined in a stat- 
ute which marked the middle period of Elizabeth's reign. By this 
act houses of correction were ordered to be established for the 
punishment and amendment of the vagabond class by means of 
compulsory labor; while the power to levy and assess a general 
rate in each parish for the relief of the poor was transferred from 
the justices to its church- wardens. The well-known act which 
matured and finally established this system, the 43d of Elizabeth, 
remained the base of our system of pauper -administration until 
a time within the recollection of living men. Whatever flaws a 
later experience has found in these measures, their wise and hu- 
mane character formed a striking contrast to the legislation which 
had degraded our statute-book from the date of the Statute of La- 
borers ; and their efficacy at the time was proved by the entire 
cessation of the great social danger against which they Avere in- 
tended to provide. 

Its cessation, however, was owing not merely to law, but to the 
natural growth of wealth and industry throughout the country. 
The change in the mode of cultivation, whatever social embarrass- 
ment it might bring about, undoubtedly favored production, Not 
only was a larger capital brought to bear upon the land, but the 
mere change in the system brought about a taste for new and bet- 
ter modes of agriculture ; the breed of horses and of cattle was im- 
proved, and a far greater use made of manure and dressings. One 
acre under the new system produced, it was said, as much as two 
under the old. As a more careful and constant cultivation was 
introduced, a greater number of hands were required on every 
farm; and much of the surplus labor which had been flung off the 
land in the commencement of the new system was thus recalled to 
it. But a far more efiicient agency in absorbing the unemployed 
'was found in the development of manufactures. The linen trade 
was as yet of small value, and that of silk-weaving was only just 
introduced. But the Avoolen manufacture had become an impor- 
tant element in the national wealth. England no longer sent her 
fleeces to be woven in Flanders and to be dyed at Florence. The 
spinning of yarn, the weaving, fulling, and dyeing of cloth, were 
spreading rapidly from the towns over the country-side. The 
worsted trade, of which Norwich was the centre, extended over 
the whole of the Eastern counties. The farmers' wives began ev- 
ery where to spin their wool from their own shecps' backs into a 
coarse " homespun." The South and the West still remained the 
great seats of industry and of wealth, the great homes of mining 
and manufacturing activity. The iron manufactures were limited 
to Kent and Sussex, though their prosperity in this quarter was 
already threatened by the growing scarcity of the wood which fed 
their furnaces, and by the exhaustion of the forests of the weald, 
Cornwall was then, as now, the sole exporter of tin ; and the ex- 



398 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



portation of its copper was just beginning. The broadcloths of 
the West claimed the palm, among the woolen stuffs of England. 
The Cinque Ports held almost a monopoly of the commerce of the 
Channel. Every little harbor, from the Foreland to the Land's 
End, sent out its fleet of fishing-boats, manned with the bold sea- 
men who furnished crews for Drake and the buccaneers. But in 
the reign of Elizabeth the poverty and inaction to which tlie 
North had been doomed since the fall of the Roman rule begin 
at last to be broken. We see the first signs of the coming revo- 
lution Avhich has transferred English manufactures and English 
wealth to the north of the Mersey and the Humber, in the men- 
tion which now meets us of the friezes of Manchester, the cover- 
lets of York, and the dependence of Halifax on its cloth trade. 

The growth, however, of English commerce far outstripped that 
of its manufactures. We must not judge of it, indeed, by any 
modern standard ; for the whole population of the country can 
hardly have exceeded five or six millions, and the burden of all 
the vessels engaged in ordinary commerce was estimated at little 
more than fifty thousand tons. The size of the vessels employed 
in it would nowadays seem insignificant ; a modern collier brig is 
probably as large as the biggest merchant vessel which then sail- 
ed from the port of London. But it was under Elizabeth that 
English commerce began the rapid career of development which 
has made us the carriers of the world. By far the most important 
branch of it was with Flanders ; Antwerp and Bruges were in 
fixct the general marts of the world in the early part of the six- 
teenth century, and the annual export of English wool and dra- 
pery to their markets was estimated at a sum of more than two 
millions in value. It was with the ruin of Antwerp, at the time 
of its siege and capture by the Duke of Parma, that the commer- 
cial supremacy of our own capital may be said to have been first 
established. A third of the merchants and manufacturers of the 
ruined city are said to have found a refuge on the banks of the 
Thames. The export trade to Flanders died away as London de- 
veloped into the general mart of Europe, where the gold and sug- 
ar of the New World were found side by side with the cotton 
of Lidia, the silks of the East, and the woolen stuffs of England 
itself. The foundation of the Royal Exchange by Sir Thomas 
Gresham was a mark of the commercial progress of the time. Not 
only was the old trade of the world transferred in great part to 
the English Channel, but the sudden burst of national vigor found 
new outlets for its activity. The Venetian carrying fleet still 
touched at Southampton; but as far back as the reign of Henry 
the Seventh a commercial treaty had been concluded with Flor- 
ence, and the trade with the Mediterranean which had begun un- 
der Richard the Third constantly took a wider development. The 
intercourse between England and the Baltic ports had hitherto 
been kept up by the Hanseatic merchants ; but the extinction of 
their London depot, the Steel Yard, at this time, was a sign that 
this trade too had now passed into English hands. The growth 
of Boston and Hull marked an increase of commercial intercourse 



VII.] 



THE EEFOEMATIOK. 



399 



with the North. The prosperity of Bristol, which depended in 
great measure on the trade with Ireland, was stimulated by the 
conquest and colonization of that island at the close of the Queen's 
reign and the beginning of her successor's. The dream of a north- 
ern passage to India opened up a trade with a land as yet un- 
known. Of the three ships which sailed under Richard Willough- 
by to realize this dream, two were found afterward frozen with 
their crews and their hapless commander on the coast of Lap- 
land ; but the third, under Richard Chancellor, made its way safe- 
ly to the White Sea, and by its discovery of Archangel created 
the trade with Russia, A more lucrative traffic had already be- 
gun with the coast of Guinea, to whose gold-dust and ivory the 
merchants of Southampton owed their wealth ; but the guilt of 
the slave-trade which sprang out of it rests with John Hawkins, 
whose arms (a demi-moor, proper, bound with a cord) commemo- 
rated his priority in the transport of negroes from Africa to the 
labor fields of the New World. The fisheries of the Channel and 
the German Ocean gave occupation to the numerous ports which 
lined the coast from Yarmouth to Plymouth Haven ; Bristol and 
Chester were rivals in the fisheries of Ulster ; and the voyage of 
Sebastian Cabot from the former port to the main-land of North 
America had called its vessels to the stormy ocean of the North. 
From the time of Henry the Eighth the number of English boats 
engaged on the cod-banks of Newfomadland steadily increased, 
and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the seamen of Biscay found 
English rivals in the whale-fishery of the Polar seas. 

What Elizabeth really contributed to this commercial develop- 
ment was the peace and social order from which it sprang, and 
the thrift which spared the purses of her subjects by enabling her 
to content herself with the ordinary resources of the Crown. She 
lent, too, a ready patronage to the new commerce, she shared in 
its speculations, she considered its extension and protection as a 
part of public policy, and she sanctioned the formation of the 
gi-eat merchant companies which could then alone secure the 
trader against wrong or injustice in distant countries. The Mer- 
chant Adventurers of London, a body which had existed long be- 
fore, and had received a charter of incorporation under Henry 
the Seventh, furnished a model for the Russian Company, and the 
company which absorbed the new commerce to the Indies. But 
it was not wholly with satisfaction that either Elizabeth or her 
ministers watched the social change which wealth was jd reducing 
around them. They feared the increased expenditure and com- 
fort which necessarily followed it, as likely to impoverish the land 
and to eat out the hardihood of the people. "England spendeth 
more on wines in one year," complained Cecil, " than it did in an- 
cient times in four years." The disuse of salt-fish and the greater 
consumption of meat marked the improvement Avhich was taking 
place among the agricultural classes. Their rough and wattled 
farm-houses were being superseded by dwellings of brick and stone. 
Pewter was replacing the wooden trenchers of the earlier yeoman- 
ry ; there were yeomen who could boast of a fair show of silver 



400 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



plate. It is from this period, indeed, that we can first date the 
rise of a conception which seems to us now a peculiarly English 
one, the conception of domestic comfort. The chimney-corner, so 
closely associated with family life, came into existence with the 
general introduction of chimneys, a feature rare in ordinary houses 
at the beginning of this reign. Pillows, which had before been 
despised by the farmer and the trader as fit only "for women in 
child-bed," were now in general use. Carpets superseded the 
filthy flooring of rushes. The lofty houses of the wealthier mer- 
chants, their parapeted fronts, their costly wainscoting, the cum- 
brous but elaborate beds, the carved staircases, the quaintly fig- 
ured gables, not only broke the mean appearance which liad till 
then characterized English towns, but marked the rise of a new 
middle and commercial class which Avas to play its part in later 
history. A transformation of an even more striking kind pro- 
claimed the extinction of the feudal character of the noblesse. 
Gloomy walls and serried battlements disappeared fi-om the dwell- 
ings of the gentry. The strength of the mediaeval fortress gave 
way to the pomp and grace of the Elizabethan hall. Knowlo, 
Longleat, Burleigh and Hatfield, Hardwick and Audley End, are 
familiar instances of the social as well as architectural change 
which covered England with buildings where the thought of de- 
fense was abandoned for that of domestic comfort and refinement. 
We still gaze with pleasure on their picturesque line of gables, 
their fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, their 
castellated gate- ways, the jutting oriels from which the great noble 
looked down on his new Italian garden, its stately terraces and 
broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint mazes, its 
formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque shapes in hope- 
less rivalry of the cypress avenues of the South. It was the Ital- 
ian refinement of life which remodeled the interior of such houses, 
raised the principal apartments to an upper floor — a change to 
which we owe the grand staircases of the time — surrounded the 
quiet courts by long " galleries of the presence," crowned the rude 
hearth Avith huge chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and cupids, 
with quaintly interlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, 
hung tapestries on the walls, and crowded each chamber with 
quaintly carved chairs and costly cabinets. The life of the Mid- 
dle Ages concentrated itself in the vast castle hall, where the bar- 
on looked from his upper dais on the retainers who gathered at 
his board. But the great households were fast breaking up; and 
the whole feudal economy disappeared when the lord of the house- 
hold withdrew Avith his lamily into his " parlor" or " withdrawing- 
room," and left the hall to his dependents. He no longer rode at 
the head of his servants, but sat apart in the newly-introduced 
" coach." The prodigal use of glass became a marked feature in 
the domestic architecture of the time, and one Avhose influence ou 
the general health of the people can hardly be overestimated. 
Long lines of Avindows stretched over the fronts of the new manor 
halls. Every merchant's house had its orieh " You shall have 
sometimes," Lord Bacon grumbled, " your houses so full of glass. 



VII.] 



THE EEFOBMATION. 



tOl 



that we can not tell where to come to be out of the sun or the 
cold." But the prodigal enjoyment of light and sunshine was a 
mark of the temper of the age. The lavishness of a new wealth 
united with the lavishness of life, a love of beauty, of color, of dis- 
play, to revolutionize English dress. The Queen's three thousand 
robes were rivaled in their bravery by the slashed velvets, the 
ruffs, the jeweled purpoints of the courtiers around her. Men 
" wore a manor on their backs." The old sober notions of thrift 
melted before the strange revolutions of fortune wrought by the 
New World. Gallants gambled away a fortune at a sitting, and 
sailed off to make a fresh one in the Indies. Visions of galleons 
loaded to the brim with pearls and diamonds and ingots of silver, 
dreams of El-Dorados where all was of gold, threw a haze of prod- 
igality and profusion over the imagination of the meanest seaman. 
The wonders, too, of tlie New World kindled a burst of extrava- 
gant fancy in the Old. The strange medley of past and present 
which distinguishes its masques and feastings only reflected the 
medley of men's thoughts. Pedantry, novelty, the allegory of It- 
aly, the chivalry of the Middle Ages, the mythology of Rome, the 
English bear-fight, pastorals, superstition, farce, all took their turn 
in the entertainment which Lord Leicester provided for the Queen 
at Kenil worth. A " wild man" from the Indies chanted her praises, 
and Echo answered him. Elizabeth turned from the greetings of 
sibyls and giants to deliver the enchanted lady from her tyrant 
"Sans Pitie." Shepherdesses welcomed her with carols of the 
spring, while Ceres and Bacchus poured their corn and grapes at 
lier feet. 

It was to this turmoil of men's minds, this wayward luxuriance 
and prodigality of fancy, that we owe the revival of English letters 
under Elizabeth. Here, as elsewhere, the Renascence found ver- 
nacular literature all but dead, poetry reduced to the doggrel of 
Skelton, history to the annals of Fabyan or Hall ; and the over- 
powering influence of the new models, both of thought and style, 
which it gave to the world in the writers of Greece and Rome, was 
at first felt only as a fresh check to the dreams of any revival of 
English poetry or prose. Though England, indeed, shared more 
than any European country in the political and ecclesiastical results 
of the New Learning, in mere literary results it stood far behind 
the rest of Europe — Italy, or Germany, or France. More alone 
ranks among tlie gi'eat classical scholars of the sixteenth century. 
Classical learning, indeed, all but perished at the universities in 
the storm of the Reformation, nor did it revive there till the close 
of Elizabeth's reign. Insensibly, however, the influences of the 
Renascence were fertilizing the intellectual soil of England for the 
rich harvest that was to come. The growth of the grammar 
schools was realizing the dream of Sir Thomas More, and bringing 
the middle classes, from the squire to the petty tradesman, into 
contact with the masters of Greece and Rome. The love of travel, 
which became so remarkable a characteristic of Elizabeth's day, 
quickened the intelligence of the wealthier nobles. " Home-keep- 
ing youths," says Shakspere in words that mark the time, "have 

26 



402 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



ever homely wits," and a touv over the Continent was just becom- 
ing part of tlie education of a gentleman. Fairfax's version of 
Tasso, Harrington's version of Ariosto, were signs of the influence 
which the literature of Italy, the land to which travel led most fre- 
quently, exerted on English minds. The writers of Greece and 
Rome began at last to tell upon England when they were popu- 
larized by a crowd of translations. Chapman's noble version of 
Homer stands high above its fellows, but all the greater poets and 
historians of the classical world were turned into English before 
the close of the sixteenth century. It is characteristic, perha]-))?^- 
of England that historical literature was the first to rise from its 
long death, though the form in which it rose marked forcibly the 
diflerence between the world in which it had perished and that 
in which it reappeared. During the Middle Ages the world had 
been without a past, save the shadowy and unknown past of early 
Rome; and annalist and chronicler told the story of the years 
which w^ent before, as a preface to his tale of the present, but with- 
out a sense of any difference between them. But the great relig- 
ious, social, and political change which had passed over England 
under the new monarchy had broken the continuity of its life ; 
and the depth of the rift between the two ages is seen by the way 
in which history passes on its revival under Elizabeth from the 
mediaeval form of pure narrative to its modern form of an investi- 
gation and reconstruction of the past. The new interest which 
attached to the by-gone world led to the collection of its annals, 
their reprinting, and embodiment in an English shape. It w-as 
his desire to give the Elizabethan Church a basis in the past, as 
much as any pure zeal for letters, which induced Archbishop Pau- 
ker to lead the way in the first of these labors. The collection of 
historical manuscripts which, following in the track of Leland, he 
rescued from the wreck of the monastic libraries, created a school 
of antiquarian imitators, whose research and industry have pre- 
served for us almost every work of permanent historical value 
which existed before the dissolution of the monasteries. To his 
publication of some of our earlier chronicles we owe the series of 
similar publications w^hich bear the name of Camden, Twysden, 
and Gale, and which are now receiving their completion in the 
works issued by the Master of the Rolls. But as a branch of lit- 
erature, English history in the new shape which we have noted 
began in the work of the poet Daniel. The chronicles of Stowe 
and Speed, who preceded him, are simple records of the past, oft- 
en copied almost literally from the annals they used, and utterly 
without style or arrangement; while Daniel, inaccurate and su- 
perficial as he is, gave his story a literary form, and embodied it 
in a pure and graceful prose. Two larger w^orks at the close of 
Elizabeth's reign, the "History of the Turks" by KnoUes, and Ra- 
leigh's vast but unfinished plan of the "History of the World," 
showed the widening of historic interest beyond the merely na- 
tional bounds to which it had hitherto been confined. 
' A far higher development of our literature sprang from the 
growing influence w^hich Italy, as we have seen, was exerting, 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



403 



partly through travel and partly through its poetry and romances, 
on the manners and taste of the time. Men made more account 
of a story of Boccaccio's, it was said, than a story from the Bi- 
ble. The dress, the speech, the manners of Italy became objects 
of almost passionate imitation, and of an imitation not always of 
the wisest or noblest kind. To Ascham it seemed like "the en- 
chantment of Circe brought out of Italy to mar men's manners in 
England." "An Italianate Englishman," ran the harder proverb 
of Italy itself, " is an incarnate devil." The literary form which 
-this imitation took seemed at any rate absolutely absurd. John 
Lyl}^, distinguished both as a dramatist and a poet, laid aside the 
very tradition of English style for a style modeled on the deca- 
dence of Italian prose. Euphuism, as the new fashion has been 
styled from the prose romance of Euphues in which Lyly origi- 
nated it, is best known to modern readers by the pitiless cai-ica- 
ture with which Shakspeare quizzed its pedantry, its affectation, 
the meaningless monotony of its far-fetched phrase, the absurdity 
of its extravagant conceits. Its representative, Armado, in " Love's 
Labor's Lost," is "a man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight," 
" that hath a mint of phrases in his brain ; one whom the music 
of his own vain tongue doth ravish like enchanting harmony." 
But its very extravagance sprang from the general burst of de- 
light in the new resources of thought and language which litera- 
ture felt to be at its disposal ; and the new sense of literary beau- 
ty which its affectation, its love of a "mint of phrases" and the 
" music of its own vain tongue" disclose — the new sense of pleas- 
ure in delicacy or grandeur of phrase, in the structure and ar- 
rangement of sentences, in what has been termed the atmosphere 
of words — v/as a sense out of which style was itself to spring. 
For a time, euphuism had it all its own waj'-. Elizabeth was the 
most affected and detestable of euphuists; and "that beauty in 
court which could not parley euphuism," a courtier of Charles 
the First's time tells us, " was as little regarded as she that now 
there speaks not French." The fashion, however, passed away, 
but the "Ai-cadia" of Sir Philip Sidney shows the wonderful ad- 
vance which prose had made. Sidney, the nephew of Lord Leices- 
ter, was the idol of his time, and perhaps no figure reflects the 
age more fully and more beautifully. Fair as he was brave, quick 
of wit as of affection, noble and generous in temper, dear to Eliza- 
beth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of the camp, his 
learning and his genius made him the centre of the literarj^ world 
which was springing into birth on English soil. He had traveled 
in France and Italy, he was master alike of the older learning and 
of the new discoveries of astronomy. Bruno dedicated to him as 
to a friend his metaphysical speculations; he was familiar with 
the drama of Spain, the poems of Ronsard, the sonnets of Italy. 
He combined the wisdom of a grave councilor with the romantic 
chivalry of a knight-errant. " I never heard the old story of Percy 
and Douglas," he says, " that I found not my heart moved more 
than with a trumpet." He flung away his life to save the English 
army in Flanders, and as he lay dying they brought a cup of wa- 



404 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Char 



ter to his fevered lips. Sidney bade them give it to a soldier who 
was stretched on the ground beside him. " Thy necessity," ho 
said, "is greater than mine." The whole of Sidney's nature, his 
chivalry and his learning, his tliirst for adventures, his tendency 
to extravagance, his freshness of tone, his tenderness and child- 
like simplicity of heart, his afiectation and false sentiment, his 
keen sense of pleasure and delight, pours itself out in the pastoral 
medley, forced, tedious, and yet strangely beautiful, of his "Arca- 
dia." In his "Defense of Poetry" the youthful exuberance of the 
romancer has passed into the earnest vigor and grandiose stateli- 
ness of the rlietorician. But whether in the one work or the oth- 
er, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness of Sidney's 
style, remain the same. But the quickness and vivacity of En- 
glish prose were first developed in the school of Italian imitators 
who appeared in Elizabeth's later j^ears. The origin of English 
fiction is to be found in the tales and romances with which Greene 
and Nash crowded the market, models for which they found in the 
Italian novels. The brief forms of these novelettes soon led to the 
appearance of the " pamphlet ;" and a new world of readers was 
seen in the rapidity with which the stories or scurrilous libels 
which passed under this name were issued, and the greediness with 
which they were devoured. It Avas the boast of Greene that in 
the eight years before his death he had produced forty pamphlets. 
"In a night or a day would he have yarked up a pamphlet, as 
well as in seven years, and glad was that printer that might be 
blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit." Modern 
eyes see less of the wit than of the dregs in the works of Greene 
and his compeers; but the attacks which ISTash directed against 
the Puritans and his rivals were the first English Avoi-ks whicli 
shook utterly off the pedantry and extravagance of euphuism. 
In his lightness, his facility, his vivacity, his directness of speech, 
we have the beginning of popular literature. It had descended 
from the closet to the street, and the very change implied that 
the street Avas ready to receive it. The abundance, indeed, of 
printers and of printed books at the close of the Queen's reign 
shows that the world of readers and writers had widened far 
beyond the small circle of scholars and courtiers with which it 
began. 

We shall have to review at a later time the great poetic burst 
for which this intellectual advance was paving the way, and the 
moral and religious change which was passing over the country 
through the progress of "Puritanism. But both the intellectual 
and the religious impulse of the age united with the influence of 
its growing Avealth to revive a spirit of independence in the na- 
tion at large, a spirit which it was impossible for Elizabeth to un- 
derstand, but the strength of which her Avonderful tact enabled 
her to feel Long before any open conflict arose between the peo- 
ple and the Crown, we see her instinctive perception of the change 
around her in the modifications, conscious or unconscious, which 
she introduced into the system of the new monarchy. Of its 
usurpations on English liberty she abandoned none, but she cur- 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



405 



tailed and softened down almost all. She tampered, as her pred- 
ecessors had tampered, with personal freedom; there were the 
same straining of statutes and coercion of juries in political trials 
as before, and an arbitrary power of imprisonment was still exer- 
cised by the Council. The duties she imposed on cloth and sweet 
wines were an assertion of her right of arbitrary taxation. Roy- 
al proclamations constantly assumed the force of law. In one 
part of her policy indeed Elizabeth seemed to fall resolutely back 
from the constitutional attitude assumed by the Tudor sovereigns. 
Ever since Cromwell's time the Parliament had been convened al- 
most year by year as a great engine of justice and legislation, but 
Elizabeth recurred to the older jealousy of the two houses which 
had been entertained by Edward the Fourth, Henry the Seventh, 
and Wolsej'. Her parliaments were summoned at intervals of 
never less than three, and sometimes of nine, years, and never save 
on urgent necessity. Practically, however, the royal power was 
wielded with a caution and moderation that showed the sense of 
a gathci-ing difficulty in the full exercise of it. The ordinary 
course of justice was left undisturbed. The jurisdiction of the 
Council was asserted almost exclusively over the Catholics; and 
defended, in their case, as a j^recaution against pressing dangers. 
The proclamations issued were temporary in character and of 
small imjDortance. The two duties imposed were so slight as to 
pass almost unnoticed in the general satisfaction at Elizabeth's 
abstinence from internal taxation. The benevolences and forced 
loans which brought home the sense of tyranny to the subjects 
of her predecessors were absolutely abandoned. She treated the 
privy seals, which on emergencies she issued for advances to her 
exchequer, simply as anticipations of her revenue (like our ow^n 
exchequer bills), and punctually repaid them. The monopolies 
with which she had fettered trade proved a more serious grievance ; 
but during her earlier reign they were looked on as a part of the 
system of merchant associations, which were at that time regard- 
ed as necessary for the regulation and protection of the growing 
commerce. Her thrift enabled her to defray the current expenses 
of the Crown from its ordinary revenues. ]3ut the thrift was dic- 
tated not so much by economy as by the desire to avoid any 
summoning of Parliament. The Queen saw that the " manage- 
ment" of the two Houses, so easy to Cromwell, was becoming 
more difficult every day. The rise of a new nobility, enriched by 
the spoils of the Church and trained to political life among the 
perils of the religious changes, had given a fresh vigor to the 
Lords. A curious proof of the increased wealth of the country 
gentry, as well as of their increased desire to obtain a seat in the 
Commons, was shown by the cessation at this time of the old 
practice of payment of members by their constituencies. A 
change too in the borough representation, which had long been 
in progress, but was now for the first time legally recognized, 
tended greatly to increase the vigor and independence of the Low- 
er House. The members for boroughs had been required by the 
terras of the older writs to be chosen among their burgesses ; and 



iOO 



HISTORY OF IRE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



an act of Henry the Fifth gave tliis custom the force of law. 
But the passing of the act shows that it was already widely in- 
fringed ; and by the time of Elizabeth most borougli seats were 
filled by strangers, often nominees of the great land-owners round, 
but for the most part men of wealth and blood, whose aim in en- 
tering Parliament was a purely political one. So changed, indeed, 
was the tone of the Commons, even as early as the close of Hen- 
ry's reign, that Edward and Mary both fell back on the preroga- 
tive of the Crown to create boroughs, and summoned members 
from fresh constituencies, which were often mere villages, and 
wholly in the hands of the Crown. But this "packing of the 
House" had still to be continued by their successor. The large 
number of such members whom Elizabeth liad called into the 
Commons, sixty-two in all, was a proof of the increasing diffi- 
culty which was now experienced by the Government in secur- 
ing a working majority. 

Had Elizabeth lived in quiet times her thrift would have saved 
her from the need of summoning Parliament at all. But the perils 
of her reign drove her at rare intervals to the demand of a sub- 
sidy, and each demand of a subsidy forced her to assemble the 
Houses. Constitutionally the policy of Cromwell had had this 
special advantage, that at the very crisis of our liberties it had ac- 
knowledged and confirmed by repeated instances, for its own pur- 
poses of arbitrary rule, the traditional right of Parliament to grant 
subsidies, to enact laws, and to consider and petition for the re- 
dress of grievances. These rights remained, while the power 
which had turned them into a mere engine of despotism was grow- 
ing weaker year by year. Not only did the Parliament of Eliza-^ 
beth put its powers in force as fully as the Parliament of Crom- 
well, but the historical tendency which we have noticed, the tend- 
ency of the age to fall back on former times for precedents, soon 
led to a reclaiming of privileges which had died away under the 
new monarchy. During the reign of Elizabeth the House of Com- 
mons gradually succeeded in protecting its members from all ar- 
rest during its sessions, save by permission of the House itself, 
and won the rights of punishing and expelling members for crimes 
committed within the House, and of determining all matters re- 
lating to their election. The more important claim of freedom of 
speech brought on a series of petty conflicts which showed Eliza- 
beth's instincts of despotism, as well as her sense of the new pow- 
er which despotism had to face. In the great crisis of the Darn- 
ley marriage Mr. Dutton defied a royal prohibition to mention the 
subject of the succession by a hot denunciation of the Scottish 
claim. Elizabeth at once ordered him into arrest, but the Com- 
mons prayed for leave " to confer upon their liberties," and the 
Queen ordered his release. In the same spirit she commanded 
Mr. Strickland, the mover of a bill for the reform of the Common 
Prayer, to appear no more in Parliament ; but as soon as she per- 
ceived that the temper of the Commons was bent upon his restora- 
tion the command was withdrawn. On the other hand, the Com- 
mons still shrank from any violent defiance of Elizabeth's assump- 



VII.] 



THE EEFORMATION. 



407 



tion of control over freedom of speech. The bold protest of a 
Puritan member, Peter Wentworth, against it was met by the 
House itself with a committal to the Tower; and the yet bolder 
questions which he addressed to a later Parliament, " whether this 
Council is not a place for every member of the same freely and 
without control, by bill or speech, to utter any of the griefs of the 
commonwealth?" brought on him a fresh imprisonment at the 
hands of the Council, which lasted till the dissolution of the Par- 
liament, and with which the Commons declined to interfere. But 
w^hile vacillating in its assertion of the rights of individual speak- 
ers, the House steadily claimed for itself the righ.t to consider 
three cardinal subjects, the treatment of which had been regarded 
by every Tudor sovereign as lying exclusively within the compe- 
tence of the Crown. "Matters of state," as the higher political 
questions of the time were called, were jealously reserved for the 
royal cognizance alone; but the question of the succession be- 
came too vital to English freedom and English religion to remain 
confined within Elizabeth's council-chamber. At the opening of 
her reign the Commons humbly petitioned for the declaration of 
a successor and for tlie Queen's marriage ; and in spite of her re- 
buke and evasive answers, both Houses on their meeting four years 
after joined in the same demand. Her consciousness of the real 
clangers of such a request united with her arbitrary temper to 
move Elizabeth to a bursjt of passionate anger. The marriage in- 
deed she promised, but she peremptorily forbade the subject of 
the succession to be approached. Wentworth at once rose in the 
Commons to know whether such a prohibition was not " against 
the liberties of Parliament ?" and the question was followed by a 
hot debate. A fresh message from the Queen commanded " that 
there should be no further argument," but the message was met 
by a request for freedom of deliberation. Elizabeth's prudence 
taught her that retreat was necessary ; she protested that " she 
did not mean to prejudice any part of the liberties heretofore 
granted to them ;" she softened the order of silence into a request ; 
and the Commons, won by the graceful concession to a loyal assent, 
received her message " most joyfully, and with most hearty prayers 
and thanks for the same." But the victory was none the less a 
real one. No such struggle had taken place between the, Com- 
mons and the Crown since the beginning of the new monarchy, 
and the struggle had ended in the virtual defeat of the Crown. It 
v/as the prelude to a claim yet more galling to Elizabeth. Like 
the rest of the Tudor sovereigns, she held her ecclesiastical 
supremacy to be a purely personal power, with her administra- 
tion of which neither Parliament nor even her Council had any 
right to interfere. But the exclusion of the Catholic gentry 
through the Test acts, and the growth of Puritanism among the 
land-owners as a class, gave more and more a Protestant tone to 
the Commons; and it was easy to remember that the suprem- 
acy which was thus jealously guarded from Parliamentary inter- 
ference had been conferred on the Crown by a Parliamentary 
statute. Here, however, the Queen, as the religious representative 



408 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of the two parties who made up her "subjects, stood ou firmer 
ground than the Commons, who represented but one of them. 
And she used her advantage boldly. The bills proposed by the 
Puritans for the reform of the Common Prayer were at her com- 
mand delivered up into her hands and suppressed. Wentworth, 
the most outspoken of his party, was, as we have seen, imprisoned 
in the Tower; and in a later Parliament the Speaker was express- 
ly forbidden to receive bills "for reforming the Church, and trans- 
forming the commonwealth." In spite of these obstacles, how- 
ever, the effort for reform continued, and though crushed by the 
Crown or set aside by the Lords, ecclesiastical bills Avere present- 
ed in every Parliament. A better fortune awaited the Commons 
in their attack on the royal prerogative in matters of trade. 
Complaints made of the licenses and monopolies, by which inter- 
nal and external commerce were fettered, were at first repressed 
by a royal reprimand as matters neither pertaining to the Com- 
mons nor within the compass of their understanding. When the 
subject was again stirred, nearly twenty years afterward, Sir Ed- 
ward Hoby was sharply rebuked by "a great personage" for his 
complaint of the illegal exactions made by the exchequer. But 
the bill which he promoted Avas sent up to the Lords in spite of 
this, and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the storm of popular in- 
dignation which had been roused by the growing grievance nerved 
the Commons to a decisive struggle. It was in vain that tlie 
ministers opposed the bill for the abolition of monopolies, and 
after four days of vehement debate 'the tact of Elizabeth taught 
her to give way. She acted with her usual ability, declared her 
previous ignorance of the existence of the evil, thanked the House, 
for its interference, and quashed at a single blow every monopoly 
that she had granted. 



Section VI The Armada. 1572— 15S8. 

[^Authorities. — As before for the general historj' of this reign. The state of the 
Catholics is described by Lingard ("History of England"), and the religious pol- 
icy of Elizabeth criticised with remarkable fairness by Hallam ("Constitutional 
History").] 

The wonderful growth in wealtb and social energy which we 
have described was accompanied by a remarkable change in the 
religious temper of the nation. It was in the years which we 
are traversing that England became firmly Protestant. The qui- 
et decay of the traditionary Catholicism which formed the religion 
of three-fourths of the people at Elizabeth's accession is shown by 
the steady diminution in the number of recusants throughout her 
reign ; and at its close the only parts of England where the old 
faith retained any thing of its former vigor were the North and 
the extreme West, at that time the poorest and least populated 
parts of the kingdom. The main cause of the change lay un- 
doubtedly in the gradual dying-out of the Catholic priesthood, 
and the growth of a new Protestant clergy who supplied their 



VII.] 



THE BEFOEMATION. 



409 



place. The older parish priests, though they had almost to a man 
acquiesced in the changes of ritual and doctrine which the various 
phases of the Reformation imjDOsed upon them, remained in heart 
utterly hostile to its spirit. As Mary had undone the changes of 
Edward, they hoped for a Catholic successor to undo the changes 
of Elizabeth ; and in the mean time they were content to wear the 
surplice instead of the chasuble, and to use the communion office 
instead of the mass-book. But if they were forced to read the 
homilies from the pulpit, the spirit of their teaching remained un- 
changed ; and it was easy for them to cast contempt on the new 
services, till they seemed to old-fashioned worshipers a mere 
"Christmas game." But the lapse of twenty years did its work 
in emptying parsonage after parsonage, and the jealous supervis- 
ion of Parker and the bishops insured an inner as well as an outer 
conformity to the established faith in the clergy who took the 
place of the dying priesthood. The new parsons were for the 
most part not merely Protestant in belief and teaching, but ultra- 
Protestant. The old restrictions on the use of the pulpit were si- 
lently removed as the need for them passed away, and the zeal of 
the young ministers showed itself in an assiduous preaching Avhich 
moulded in their own flishion the religious ideas of the new gen- 
eration. But their character had even a greater influence than 
their preaching. Under Henry the priests had for the most parti 
been ignorant and sensual men ; and the character of the clergy 
appointed by the greedy Protestants of Edward's reign was even 
worse than that of their Popish rivals. But the energy of the 
Primate, seconded as it was by the general increase of zeal and 
morality at the time, did its work ; and by the close of Elizabeth's 
reign the moral temper as well as the social character of the clergy 
liad wholly changed. Scholars like Hooker, gentlemen like George 
Herbert, could now be found in the ranks of the priesthood, and 
the grosser scandals which had disgraced the clergy as a body for 
the most part disappeared. It was impossible for a Puritan libel- 
er to bring against the ministers of Elizabeth's reign the charges 
of drunkenness and immorality which Protestant libelers had 
been able to bring against the priesthood of Henry's. But the 
influence of the new clergy was backed by a general revolution in 
English thought. We have already watched the first upgrowth 
of the new literature which was to find its highest types in Shaks- 
pere and Bacon. The grammar schools were diffusing a new 
knowledge and mental energy through the middle classes and 
among the country gentry. The tone of the universities, no un- 
fair test of the tone of the nation at large, changed wholly as the 
Queen's reign went on. At its opening Oxford Avas a nest of 
Papists, and sent its best scholars to feed the Catholic seminaries. 
At its close the university was a hot-bed of Puritanism, where the 
fiercest tenets of Calvin reigned supreme. The movement was no 
doubt hastened by the political circumstances of the time. Under 
the rule of Elizabeth loyalty became more and more a passion 
among Englishmen ; and the Bull of Deposition placed Rome in 
the forefront of Elizabeth's foes. The conspiracies which festered 



410 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



around Mary were laid to the Pope's charge; he was known to be 
pressing on France and on Spain the invasion and conquest of the 
heretic kingdom ; he was soon to bless the Armada. Every day 
made it harder fur a Catholic to reconcile Catholicism with loyalty 
to his Queen or devotion to his country; and the mass of men, 
who are moved by sentiment rather than by reason, swung slowly 
round to the side which, whatever its religious significance might 
be, was the side of patriotism, of liberty against tyranny, of En- 
gland against Spain. Whatever fire and energy were wanting to 
tlie new movement, were given at last by the atrocities whicli 
marked the Catholic triumph on the other side of the Channel. 
The horror of Alva's butcheries, or of the massacre on St. Bartholo- 
mew's Day, revived the memories of the bloodshed under Marj'. 
The tale of Protestant sufierings was told with a wonderful patlios 
and picturesqueness by John Foxe, an exile during the persecution ; 
and his "Book of Martyrs," which had been set up by royal order 
in the churches for public reading, passed from the churches to the 
shelves of every English household. The trading classes of the 
towns had been the first to embrace the doctrines of the Reforma- 
tion, but their Protestantism became a passion as the refugees of 
the Continent brought to shop and market their tale of outrage 
and blood. Thousands of Flemish exiles found a refuge in the 
Cinque Ports, a third of the Antwerp merchants were seen pacing 
the new London Exchange, and a chui'ch of French Huguenots 
found a home which it still retains in the crypt of Canterbury 
Cathedral. 

In her ecclesiastical policy Elizabeth trusted mainly to time; 
and time, as we have seen, justified her trust. Her system of com>- 
promise both in faith and Avorship, of quietly replacing the old 
priesthood as it died out by Protestant ministers, of wearying re- 
cusants into at least outer conformity with the state religion and 
attendance on the state services by fines — a policy aided, no doubt, 
by the moral influences we have described — was gradually bring- 
ing England round to a new religious front. But the decay of 
Catholicism appealed strongly to the new spirit of Catholic zeal 
which, in its despair of aid from Catholic princes, was now girding 
itself for its own bitter struggle with heresy. Dr. Allen, a scholar 
who had been driven from Oxford by the test prescribed in the 
Act of Uniformity, had foreseen the results of the dying-out of the 
Marian priests, and had set up a seminary at Douay to supply their 
place. The new college, liberally supported by the Catholic peers 
and supplied with pupils by a stream of refugees from Oxford, 
soon landed its "seminary priests" on English shores; and, few as 
they were at first, their presence was at once felt in the check 
which it gave to the gradual reconciliation of the Catholic gentry 
to the English Church. No check could have been more galling 
to Elizabeth, and her resentment was quickened by the sense of a 
fresh danger. She had accepted from the first the issue of the Ball 
of Deposition as a declaration of war on the part of Rome, and slie 
viewed the Douay priests simply as political emissaries of the 
Papacy. The comparative security of the Catholics from active 



VII.] 



THE BEFOEMATION. 



411 



persecution during the early part of her reign had arisen, as we 
have seen, partly from the sympatliy and connivance of tlie gentry 
who acted as justices of the peace, but still more from her own re- 
ligious indifference. But the Test Act placed the magistracy in 
Protestant Imnds ; and as Elizabeth passed from indifference to 
suspicion, and from suspicion to terror, she no longer chose to re- 
strain the bigotry around her. In quitting Eaton Hall, which she 
had visited in one of her pilgrimages, the Queen gave its master, 
young Rookwood, thanks for his entertainment and lier hand to 
kiss. " But my lord chamberlain nobly and gravely understand- 
ing that Rookwood was excommunicate" for non - attendance at 
church, " called him before him, demanded of him how he durst 
presume to attempt her royal presence, he unfit to accompany any 
Christian person, forthwith said that he was fitter for a pair of 
stocks, commanded him out of court, and yet to attend the Coun- 
cil's pleasure." The Council's pleasure was seen in his committal 
to the town prison at ISTorwicli, while " seven more gentlemen of 
worship" were fortunate enough to escape with a simple sentence 
of arrest at their own homes. The Queen's terror became, in fact, 
a panic in the nation at large. The few priests who had landed 
from Douay were multiplied into an army of Papal emissaries, dis- 
patched to sow treason and revolt throughout the land. Tlie Par- 
liament, which had now through the working of the Test Act be- 
come a wholly Protestant body, save for the presence of a few 
Catholics among the peers, was summoned to meet the new dan- 
ger, and declared the landing of the priests and the harboring of 
them to be treason. The act proved no idle menace ; and the ex- 
ecution of Cuthbert Mayne, a young priest Avho had been arrest- 
ed in Cornwall, gave a terrible indication of the character of the 
struggle upon which Elizabeth was about to enter. Slie shrank, 
indeed, from the charge of religious persecution ; she boasted of 
her abstinence from any interference with men's consciences ; and 
Cecil, in his official defense of her policy, while declaring freedom 
of worship to be incompatible with religious order, boldly assert- 
ed the right of every English subject to perfect freedom of relig- 
ious opinion. To modern eyes there is something even more re- 
volting than open persecution in the policy whicli branded every 
Catholic priest as a traitor, and all Catholic worship as disloyal- 
ty ; but the first step toward toleration was won when the Queen 
rested her system of repression on purely political grounds. Eliz- 
abeth was a persecutor, but she was the first English ruler who 
felt the charge of religions persecution to be a stigma on her 
rule; the first who distinctly disclaimed religious differences as a 
ground for putting men to death. It is fair, too, to acknowledge 
that there was a real political danger in the new missionaries. 
The efforts of the seminary priests were succeeded by those of a 
body whose existence was a standing threat to every Protestant 
throne. A large number of the Oxford refugees at Douay joined 
the order of the Jesuits, whose members were already famous for 
their blind devotion to the Avill and judgments of Rome; and the 
two ablest and most eloquent of these exiles, Campian, once a fel- 



412 



HIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



low of St, John's, and Parsons, once a fellow of Balliol, were se- 
lected as the heads of a Jesuit mission in England. For the mo- 
ment their success was amazing. The eagerness shown to hear 
CamjDian was so great, that, in spite of the denunciations of the 
Government, he was able to preach with hardly a show of conceal- 
ment to a vast audience in Smithfield, From London the mission- 
aries wandered in the disguise of captains or serving-men, or some 
times in the cassock of the English clergy, through many of the 
counties; and wherever they went the zeal of the Catholic gentry 
revived. The list of nobles reconciled to the old faith by the wan- 
dering apostles was headed by the name of Lord Oxford, Bur- 
leigh's own son-in-law, and the proudest among English peers. The 
success of the Jesuits in undoing Elizabeth's work of compromise 
was shown in a more public way by the unanimity with which 
the Catholics withdrew from attendance at the national worship. 
As in the case of the seminary priests, however, the panic of the 
Protestants and of the Parliament far outran the greatness of the 
danger. The little group of missionaries was magnified by poj)u- 
lar fancy into a host of disguised Jesuits ; and the imaginary in- 
vasion was met by statutes which prohibited the saying of mass 
even in private houses, increased the fine on recusants to twenty 
pounds a month, and enacted that " all persons pretending to any 
power of absolving subjects from their allegiance, or practicing to 
withdraw them to the Romish religion, with all persons after the 
present session willingly so absolved or reconciled to the See of 
Rome, shall be guilty of high treason." The way in which the 
vast powers conferred on the Crown by this statute were used by 
Elizabeth was not only characteristic in itself, but important as 
at once defining the policy to which, in theory at least, her suc- 
cessors adhered for more than a hundred years, No layman was 
brought to the bar or to the block under its provisions. The op- 
pression of the Catholic gentry was limited to an exaction, more 
or less rigorous at different times, of the fines for recusancy or 
non-attendance at public worship. The work of bloodshed was 
reserved wholly for priests, and under Elizabeth this work was 
done with a ruthless energy which for the moment crushed the 
Catholic reaction. The Jesuits were tracked by Walsingham's 
spies, dragged from their hiding-places, and sent in batches to 
the Tower, So hot had been the pursuit that Parsons was forced 
to fly across the Channel ; while Campian was brought a prison- 
er through the streets of London, amid the howling of the mob, 
and placed at the bar on the charge of treason. " Our religion 
only is our crime," was a plea which galled his judges; but the 
political danger of the Jesuit preaching was disclosed in his eva- 
sion of any direct reply, when questioned as to his belief in the 
validity of the excommunication and deposition of the Queen by 
the Papal see. The death of Campian was the prelude to a steady, 
pitiless elFort at the extermination of his class. If we adopt the 
Catholic estimate of the time, the twenty years which followed 
saw the execution of two hundred priests, while a yet greater 
number perished in the filthy and fever-stricken jails into which 



VII.] 



THE BEFOEMATION. 



413 



they were plunged. The work of reconciliation to Rome was ar- 
rested hy this ruthless energy; but, on the other hand, the work 
which the priests had effected could not be undone. The system 
of quiet compulsion and conciliation to which Elizabeth had trust- 
ed for the religious reunion of her subjects was foiled ; and the 
English Catholics, fined, imprisoned, at every crisis of national 
danger, and deprived of their teachers by the prison and the gib- 
bet, were severed, more hoj)elessly than ever from the national 
Church. 

But the effect of this bloodshed on the world without was far 
more violent, and productive of wider and greater results. The 
torture and death of the Jesuit martyrs sent a thrill of horror 
through the whole Catholic Church, and roused at last into action 
the sluggish hostility of Spain. Spain w^as at this moment the 
mightiest of European jDowers. The discovery of Columbus had 
given it the New World of the West ; the conquests of Cortez 
and Pizarro poured into its treasury the plunder of Mexico and 
Peru ; its galleons brought the rich produce of the Indies, their 
gold, their jewels, their ingots of silver, to the harbor of Cadiz, 
To the New World its king added the fairest and Avealthiest por- 
tions of the Old; he was master of Naples and Milan — the rich- 
est and the most fertile districts of Italy, of the busy provinces of 
trie Low Countries, of Flanders — the great manufacturing district 
of the time — and of Antwerp, which had become the central mart 
for the commerce of the world. His native kingdom, poor as it 
was, supplied him with the steadiest and the most daring soldiers 
that the world had seen since the fall of the Roman Empire. The 
renown of the Spanish infantry had been growing from the day 
when it flung off the onset of the French chivalry on the field of 
Ravenna ; and the Spanish generals stood without rivals in their 
military skill, as they stood without rivals in their ruthless cruel- 
ty. The whole, too, of this enormous power was massed in the 
hands of a single man. Served as he was by able statesmen and 
subtle diplomatists, Philip of Spain was his own sole minister; la- 
boring day after day, like a clerk, through the long years of his 
reign, amid the papers which crowded his closet; but resolute to 
let nothing pass without his supervision, and to suffer nothing to 
be done save by his express command. It was his boast that ev- 
ery where in tlie vast compass of his dominions he was "an ab- 
solute king," It was to realize this idea of absolutism that he 
crushed the liberties of Arragon, as his father had crushed the 
liberties of Castile, and sent Alva to tread underfoot the consti- 
tutional freedom of the Low Countries, His bigotry went hand 
in hand with his thirst for power. Italy and Spain lay hushed 
beneath the terror of the Inquisition, while Flanders was being 
purged of lieresy by the stake and the sword. The shadow of 
this gigantic povfer fell like a deadly blight over Europe. The 
new Protestantism, like the new spirit of political liberty, saw its 
real foe in Philip, It was Spain, rather than the Guises, against 
which Coligny and the Huguenots struggled in vain ; it was Spain 
with which William of Orange was wrestling for reliirious and 



414 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



civil freedom ; it was Spain whicli was soon to plunge Germany 
into the cliaos of the Thirty Years' War, and to which the Catho- 
lic world had for twenty years been looking, and looking in vain, 
for a victory over heresy in England. Vast, in fact, as Philip's 
resources were, they were drained by the yet vaster schemes of 
ambition into which his religion and his greed of power, as well 
as the wide distribution of his dominions, perpetually drew him. 
To coerce the weaker States of Italy, to preserve a commanding 
influence in Germany, to support Catholicism in France, to crush 
heresy in Flanders, to dispatch one Armada against the Turk and 
another against Elizabeth, were aims mighty enough to exhaust 
oven the power of the Spanish monarchy. But it was rather on 
the character of Philip than on the exhaustion of his treasury that 
Elizabeth counted for success in the struggle which had so long 
been going on between them. The King's temper was slow, cau- 
tious even to timidity, losing itself continually in delays, in hesita- 
tions, in anticipating remote perils, in waiting for distant chances; 
and on the slowness and hesitation of his temp)er his rival had 
been playing ever since she mounted the throne. The diplomatic 
contest between the two was like the fight winch England was 
soon to see between the ponderous Spanish galleon and the light 
pinnace of the buccaneers. The agility, the sudden changes of 
Elizabeth, her lies, her mystifications, though they failed to deceive 
Philip, puzzled and impeded his mind. But amid all this cloud 
of intrigue the Queen's course had in reality been simple. In her 
earlier days France rivaled Spain in its greatness, and Elizabeth 
simply played the two rivals off against one another. She hinder- 
ed France from giving effective aid to Mary Stuart by threats of 
an alliance with Spain ; while she induced Philip to wink at her 
heresy, and to discourage the risings of the English Catholics, by 
playing on his dread of her alliance with France. But the tide 
of religious passion Avhich had so long been held in check broke 
at last over its banks, and the political face of Europe was instant- 
ly changed. The Low Countries, driven to despair by the greed 
and persecution of Alva, rose in a revolt Avhich after strange alter- 
nations of fortune gave to Europe the republic of the United 
Provinces. The opening which their rising afforded to the ambi- 
tion of France was at once seized by Coligny and the French Prot- 
estants, and used as a political engine to break the power which 
the Queen-mother, Catharine of Medicis, exercised over Charles the 
Ninth, Charles was on the point of surrendei-ing himself to am- 
bition and the Huguenots, when Catharine in revenge, or with the 
blind instinct of self-preservation, flung aside hfr old jDolicy of 
balancing the two parties against one another. She threw herself 
on the side of the Guises, and insured their triumph by lending 
herself to their massacre of the Protestants on St. Bartholomew's 
Day. But though the long gathering clouds of religious hatred 
had broken, Elizabeth trusted to her dexterity to keep out of the 
storm. If France, torn with civil strife, had ceased to be a balance 
to Spain, she found a new balance in Flanders. Whatever enthusi- 
asm the heroic stru2:gle of the Prince of Orange had excited among 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



415 



lier subjects, it failed to move Elizabeth even for an instant from 
the path of cold self-interest. To her the revolt of the Nether- 
lands was simply "a bridle of Spain, which kept war out of our 
own gate." At the darkest moment of the contest, when even 
William of Orange dreamed of abandoning all, and seeking in far- 
oiF seas a new home for liberty, the Queen bent her energies to 
prevent him from finding succor in France. That the Provinces 
could in the end withstand Pliilip, neither she nor any English 
statesmen believed. They held that the struggle must close either 
in utter subjection of the Netherlands, or in their selling them- 
selves for aid to France; and the accession of power which either 
result must give to one of her two Catholic foes the Queen was 
eager to avert. Her plan for averting it was by forcing the Prov- 
inces to accept the terms offered by Spain — a restoration, that is, 
of their constitutional privileges, accompanied by their submission 
to the Church. Peace on such a footing avouM not only restore 
English commerce, which suffered from the war; it would leave 
Flanders still formidable as a weapon against Philip. The free- 
dom of the Provinces would be saved — and the religious question 
involved in a fresh submission to the yoke of Catholicism was one 
which Elizabeth was incapable of appreciating. To her the steady 
refusal of William the Silent to sacrifice his faith was as unintel- 
ligible as the steady bigotry of Philip in demanding such a sacri- 
fice. It was of more immediate consequence that Philip's anxiety 
to avoid provoking an intervention on the part of England, which 
Avould destroy all hope of his success in Flanders, left her tranquil 
at home. Mary Stuart saw her hope of foreign aid disappear at) 
a time Avhen the death of ISTorfolk and Northumberland removed 
the dread of civil war. At no moment had the Queen felt so se- 
cure against a blow from Philip as Avhen Philip at last was forced 
to deliver his blow. 

The control of events was, in fact, passing from the hands of 
statesmen and diplomatists ; and the long period of suspense which 
their policy had won was ending in the clash of national and 
political passions. The rising fanaticism of the Catholic world, 
driven to frenzy by the martyrdom of the English Jesuits, broke- 
down the caution and hesitation of Philip; while England set 
aside the balanced neutrality of Elizabeth, and pushed boldly for- 
ward to a contest which it felt to be inevitable. The public opin- 
ion, to which the Queen was so sensitive, took every day a bolder 
and more decided tone. ■ When one of the last of her matrimonial 
intrigues threatened England with a Catholic sovereign in the 
Duke of Alencon, a younger son of the hated Catharine of Medicis, 
the popular indignation rose suddenly into a cry against "a Pop- 
ish king" which the Queen dared not defy. Her cold indifference 
to the heroic struggle in Flanders was more than compensated by 
the enthusiasm it excited among the nation at large. The earlier 
Flemish refugees found a refuge in the Cinque Ports. The exiled 
merchants of Antwerp Avere welcomed by the merchants of Lon- 
don. While Elizabeth di-ibbled out her secret aid to the Prince 
of Orange, the London traders sent him half a million from their 



41G 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



own purses, a sura equal to a year's revenue of the Crown. Vol- 
unteers stole across the Channel in increasing numbers to the aid 
of the Dutch, till the five hundred Englishmen who fought in the 
beginning of the struggle rose to a brigade of five thousand, whose 
bravery turned one of the most critical battles of the war. Dutch 
privateers found shelter in English ports, and English vessels 
hoisted the flag of the States for a dash at the Spanish traders. 
The Protestant fervor rose steadily as "the best captains and sol- 
diers" returned from the campaigns in the Low Countries to tell 
of Alva's atrocities, or as privateers brought back tales of English 
seamen who had been seized in Spain and the New World, to lin- 
ger amid the tortures of the Inquisition, or to die in its fires. In 
the presence of this steady drift of popular passion the diplomacy 
of Elizabeth became of little moment. If the Queen was resolute 
for jDcace, England was resolute for war, A new daring had arisen 
since the beginning of her reign, when Cecil and the Queen stood 
alone in their belief in England's strength, and when the diplo- 
matists of Europe regarded her obstinate defiance of Spain as 
" madness." The whole people had soon caught the self-confidence 
and daring of their Queen. Four years after her accession the 
seamen of the Southern coast were lending their aid to the Hugue- 
nots; and the Channel swarmed with "sea-dogs," as they were 
called, who accepted letters of marque from the Prince of Conde 
and the French Protestants, and took heed neither of the com- 
plaints of the French Court nor of Elizabeth's own eflbrts at re- 
pression. Her elforts failed before the connivance of every man 
along the coast, of the port ofiicers of the Crown itself, who made 
profit out of the spoil, and of the gentry of the West, who were 
hand and glove with the adventurers. The temporary suspension 
of the French contest only drove the sea-dogs to the West Indies; 
for the Papal decree which gave the New World to Spain, and the 
threats of Philip against any Protestant who should visit its seas, 
fell idly on the ears of English seamen. It was in vain that their 
trading vessels were seized and the sailors flung into the dungeons 
of the Inquisition, " laden with irons, without sight of sun or moon." 
The profits of the trade were large enough to counteract its perils, 
and the bigotry of Philip was met by a bigotry as merciless as his 
own. Francis Drake, whose name became the terror of the Span- 
ish Indies, was the son of a Protestant vicar in Kent, whose fam- 
ily had sufiered for their religion in the time of the Six Articles ; 
and his Puritanism went hand in hand with his love of adventure. 
To sell negroes to the planters, to kill Spaniards, to sack gold- 
ships, were in the young seaman's mind the work of "the elect of 
God." He had conceived a daring design of penetrating into the 
Pacific, whose waters had never seen an English flag ; and, backed 
by a company of adventurers, he set sail for the Southern seas in 
a vessel hardly as big as a Channel schooner, with a few yet small- 
er companions who "fell aM^ay before the storms and perils of the 
voyage. But Drake with his one ship and eighty men held bold- 
ly on ; and passing the Straits of Magellan, untraversed as yet by 
any Englishman, swept the unguarded coast of Chili and Peru, 



VII.] 



TRE BEFOBMATION. 



41' 



loaded his bark with the gold-dust and silver ingots of Potosi, and 
with the pearls, emeralds, and diamonds which formed the cargo 
of the great galleon that sailed once a year from Lima to Cadiz. 
With spoils of above half a million in value the daring adventurer 
steered undauntedly for the Moluccas, rounded the Cape of Good 
Hope, and after completing the circuit of the globe dropped an- 
chor again in Plymouth harbor. 

The romantic daring of Drake's voyage, and the vastness of the 
spoil, roused a general enthusiasm throughout England ; but the 
welcome he had received from Elizabeth oii his return was accept- 
ed by Philip as an outrage which could only be expiated by war. 
The "personal wrong was imbittered in the year which followed 
by the persecution of the Jesuits, and by the outcry of the Cath- 
olic world against the King's selfish reluctance to avenge the blood 
of its martyrs. Sluggish as it was, his blood was fired at last by 
the defiance with which Elizabeth received all prayers for redress. 
She met his demand for Drake's surrender by knighting the free- 
booter, and by wearing in her crown the jewels he had ofiTered 
her as a present. When the Spanish embassador threatened that 
" matters would come to the cannon," she replied " quietly, in her 
most natural voice, as if she were telling a common story," wrote 
Mendoza, " that if I used threats of that kind she would fling 
me into a dungeon." It was in the same spirit that she rejected 
Philip's intercession on behalf of the Catholics, and for the relaxa- 
tion of the oppressive laws against their worship. Outraged as 
he was, she believed that with Flanders still in revolt, and France 
longing for her alliance to enable it to seize the Low Countries, 
the King could not afford to quarrel with her; and her trust in 
his inactivity seemed justified by the jealousy with which he re- 
garded, and succeeded in foiling, the project for a Catholic revolt 
which was to have followed a descent of the Guises on the En- 
glish coast. But if Philip shielded Elizabeth from France, it was 
because he reserved England for his own ambition. The first ves- 
sels of the great fleet of invasion which was to take the name of 
the Armada were gathering slowly in the Tagus, when two re- 
markable events freed the King's hands for action by changing 
the face of European politics. The assassination of the Prince of 
Orange seemed to leave Flanders at his mercy, and the death of 
the Duke of Alenjon left Henry of Navarre, the leader of the 
Huguenot party, heir of the crown of France. To prevent the 
triumph of heresy in the succession of a Protestant king, the 
Guises and the French Catholics rose at once in arms; but the 
Holy League which they formed rested mainly on the support of 
Philip. Philip, therefore, so long as he supplied them with men 
and money, was secure on the side of France. At the same time 
the progress of his army under the Prince of Parma, and the di- 
visions of the States after the loss of their great leader, promised 
a speedy reconquest of the Low Countries; and the fall of Ant- 
werp after a gallant resistance convinced even Elizabeth of the 
need for action if the one "bridle to Spain which kept war out of 
our own gates" was to be saved. Lord Leicester was hurried to 

27 



418 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the Flemish coast with 8000 men ; but their forced inaction was 
checkered only by a disastrous skirmish at Zutphen, the fight in 
which Sidney fell, while Elizabeth was vainly striving to negoti- 
ate a peace between Philip and the States. Meanwhile dangers 
thickened round her in England itself. Maddened by persecution, 
by the hopelessness of rebellion within or of deliverance from 
without, the fiercer Catholics listened to schemes of assassination, 
to which the murder of William of Orange lent at the moment a 
terrible significance. The detection of Somerville, a fanatic who 
had received the host before setting out for London "to shoot the 
Queen with his dagg," was followed by measures of natural se- 
verity, by the flight and arrest of Catholic gentry and peers, by a 
vigorous purification of the Inns of Court, where a few Catholics 
lingered, and by the dispatch of fresh batches of priests to the 
block. The trial and death of Parry, a member of the House of 
Commons who had served in the Queen's household, on a similar 
charge, brought the Parliament together in a transport of horror 
and loyalty. All Jesuits and seminary priests were banished from 
the realm on pain of death. A bill for the security of the Queen 
disqualified any claimant of the succession who had instigated sub- 
jects to rebellion or hurt to the Queen's person from ever succeed- 
ing to the crown. The threat was aimed at Mary Stuart. Weary 
of her long restraint, of her failure to rouse Philip or Scotland to 
aid her, of the bafiied revolt of the English Catholics and the baf- 
fled intrigues of the Jesuits, she bent for a moment to submission. 
"Let me go," she wrote to Elizabeth; "let me retire from this 
island to some solitude where I may prepare my soul to die. 
Grant this and I will sign away every right which either I or 
mine can claim," But the cry was useless, and her despair found' 
a new and more terrible hope in the plots against Elizabeth's life. 
She knew and approved the vow of Anthony Babington and a band 
of young Catholics, for the most part connected with the royal 
household, to kill the Queen ; but plot and approval alike passed 
through Walsingham's hands, and the seizure of Mary's cori-e- 
spondence revealed her guilt. In spite of her protests, a commis- 
sion of peers sat as her judges at Fotheringay Castle; and their 
verdict of "guilty" annihilated under the provisions of the recent 
statute her "claim to the crown. The streets of London blazed 
with bonfires, and peals rang out from steeple to steeple at the 
news of her condemnation ; but, in spite of the prayer of Parlia- 
ment for her execution, and the pressure of the Council, Elizabeth 
shrank from her death. The force of public opinion, however, was 
now carrying all before it, and the unanimous demand of her peo- 
ple wrested at last a sullen consent from the Queen. She flung 
the warrant signed upon the floor, and the Council took on them- 
selves the responsibility of executing it. Mary died on a scaflTold 
which was erected in the castle hall at Fotheringay, as dauntless- 
ly as she had lived. " Do not weep," she said to her ladies, " I 
have given my word for you." " Tell my friends," she charged 
Melville, " that I die a good Catholic." 

The blow was hardly struck before Elizabeth turned with fury 



VII.] 



THE EEFOBMATIOX. 



419 



on the ministers who had forced her hand. Burleigh was for a 
while disgraced, Davison, who carried the warrant to the Coun- 
cil, was flung into the Tower to atone for an act which shattered 
the iDolicy of the Queen. The death of Mary Stuart, in fact, re- 
moved the last obstacle out of Philip's way, by putting an end to 
the divisions of the English Catholics. To him, as to the nearest 
heir in blood wiho was of the Catholic faith, Mary bequeathed her 
rights to the crown, and the hopes of her adherents were from 
that moment bound up in the success of Spain. The presence of 
an English army in Flanders only convinced Philip that the road 
to theconquest of the States lay through England itself; and the 
operations of Parma in the Low Countries were suspended with a 
view to the greater enterprise. Vessels and supplies for the fleet 
wdiich had for three years been gathering in the Tagus were col- 
lected from every port of the Spanish coast. It was time for 
Elizabeth to strike, and the news of the coming Armada called 
Drake again to sea. He had sailed a year before for the Indies at 
the head of twenty-five vessels ; had requited the wrongs inflict- 
ed by the Inquisition on English seamen by plundering Vigo on 
his way; and avenged his disappointment at the escape of the gold 
fleet by the sack of Santiago, and by ravaging Santo Domingo 
and Carthagena. He now set sail again with thirty small barks, 
burned the store-ships and galleys in the harbor of Cadiz, stormed 
the ports of the Faro, and was only foiled in his aim of attacking 
the Armada itself by orders from home. A descent upon Corun- 
na, however, completed what Drake called his "singeing of the 
Spanish King's beard." Elizabeth used the daring blow to back 
her negotiations for peace ; but the Spanish pride had been touch- 
ed to the quick. Amid the exchange of protocols Parma gath- 
ered thirty thousand men for the coming invasion, collected a fleet 
of flat-bottomed transports at Dunkirk, and waited impatiently for 
the Armada to protect his crossing. But the attack of Drake, the 
death of its first admiral, and the winter storms delayed the fleet 
from sailing till the spring ; and it had hardly started when a gale 
in the Bay of Biscay drove its scattered vessels into Ferrol, It 
was only on the last day of July that the sails of the Armada were 
seen from the Lizard, and the English beacons flared out their alarm 
along the coast. The news found England ready. An army was 
mustering under Leicester at Tilbuiy, the militia of the midland 
counties were gathering to London, while those of the south and 
east were held in readiness to meet a descent on either shore. 
Had Parma landed on the earliest day he purposed, he would have 
found his way to London barred hj a force stronger than his own, 
a force, too, of men who had already crossed pikes on equal terms 
with his best infantry in Flanders. "When 1 shall have landed," 
he warned his master, " I must fight battle after battle, I shall lose 
men by wounds and disease, I must leave detachments behind me 
to keej) open my communications; and in a short time the body 
of my army will become so weak that not only I may be unable 
to advance in the face of the enemy, and time may be given to the 
heretics and your Majesty's other enemies to interfere, but there 



420 



HISTOEY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



may fall out some notaMe inconveniences, witli the loss of every 
thing, and I be unable to remedy it." Even had the Prince land- 
ed, in fact, the only real chance of Spanish success lay in a Catho- 
lic rising; and at this crisis patriotism proved stronger than relig- 
ious fanaticism in the hearts of the English Catholics. Catholic 
gentry brought their vessels up alongside of Drake and Lord How- 
ard, and Catholic lords led their tenantry to the muster at Tilbury. 
But to secure a landing at all, the Spaniards had to be masters of 
the Channel ; and in the Channel lay an Englisli fleet resolved to 
struggle hard for the mastery. As the Armada sailed on in a broad 
crescent past Plymouth, moving toward its point of junction with 
Parma at Dunkirk, the vessels which had gathered under Lord How- 
ard of Effingham slipped out of the bay and hung with the wind 
upon their rear. In numbers the two forces were strangely une- 
qual; the English fleet counted only 80 vessels against the 130 
which composed the Armada. Li size of ships the disproportion 
was even greater. Fifty of the English vessels, including the squad- 
ron of Lord Hovv^ard and the craft of the volunteers, were little big- 
ger than yachts of the present day. Even of the thirty Queen's 
ships which formed its main body, there were only four which equal- 
ed in tonnage the smallest of the Spanish galleons. Sixty-five of 
these galleons formed the most formidable half of the Spanish fleet; 
and four galliasses, or gigantic galleys, armed with 50 guns apiece, 
fifty-six armed merchantmen, and twenty pinnaces, made up the 
rest. The Armada was provided with 2500 cannons, and a vast 
store of provisions ; it had on board 8000 seamen and 20,000 sol- 
diers ; and if a court favorite, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, had been 
placed at its head, he was supported by the ablest staff of naval ofr 
ficers which Spain possessed. Small, however, as the English ships 
were, they were in perfect trim; they sailed two feet for the Span- 
iards' one, they were manned with 9000 hardy seamen, and their 
admiral was backed by a crowd of captains who had won fame in 
the Spanish seas. With him Avas Hawkins, who had been the first 
to break into the charmed circle of the Indies; Frobisher, the hero 
of the IsTorth-v/est passage ; and, above all, Drake, who held com- 
mand of the privateers. They had won, too, the advantage of the 
wind ; and, closing in or drawing off as they would, the lightly 
handled English vessels, which fired four shots to the Spaniard's 
one, hung boldly on the rear of the great fleet as it moved along 
the Channel. " The feathers of the Spaniard," in the phrase of the 
English seamen, were " plucked one by one." Galleon after gal- 
leon was sunk, boarded, driven on shore; and j^^et Medina Sidonia 
failed in bringing his pursuers to a close engagement. Now halt- 
ing, now moving slowly on, the running fight between the two 
fleets lasted throughout the week, till the Armada dropped anchor 
in Calais roads. The time had now come for sharper work if the 
junction of the Armada with Parma was to be prevented; for, de- 
moralized as the Spaniards had been by the merciless chase, their 
loss in ships had not been great, while the English supplies of food 
and ammunition were fast running out. Howard resolved to 
force an engagement ; and, lighting eight fire-ships at midnight, 



VII.] 



THE BEFOEMATWX. 



421 



sent them down with the tide upon the Spanish line. The gal- 
leons at once cut their cables, and stood out in panic to sea, drift- 
ing with the wind in a long line off Gravelines. Drake resolved 
at all costs to prevent their return. At dawn the English ships 
closed fairly in, and almost their last cartridge was spent ere the 
sun went down. Three great galleons had sunk, three had drifted 
helj)lessly on to the Flemish coast; but the bulk of the Spanish 
vessels remained, and even to Drake the fleet seemed " wonderful 
great and strong." Within the Armada itself, however, all hope 
was gone. Huddled together by the wind and the deadly En- 
glish fire, their sails torn, their masts shot away, the crowded gal- 
leons had become mere slaughter-houses. Four thousand men had 
fallen, and bravely as the seamen fought they were cowed by the 
terrible butchery. Medina himself was in despair. " We are lost, 
Senor Oquenda," he cried to his bravest captain ; " what are we 
to do?" "Let others talk of being lost," replied Oquenda, "your 
Excellency has only to order up fresh cartridge." But Oquenda 
stood alone, and a council of war resolved on retreat to Spain by 
the one course open, that of a circuit round the Orkneys. "Never 
any thing pleased me better," wrote Drake, " than seeing the en- 
emy fly with a southerly wind to the northward. Have a good 
eye to the Prince of Parma, for, with the grace of God, if we 
like, I doubt not ere it be long so to handle the matter with the 
Duke of Sidonia as he shall wish himself at St. Mary Port among 
his orange-trees." But the work of destruction was reserved for 
a mightier foe than Drake. Supplies fell short, and the English 
vessels were forced to give up the chase ; but the Spanish ships 
which remained had no sooner reached the Orkneys than the 
storms of the Northern seas broke on them with a fury before which 
all concert and union disappeared. Fifty reached Corunna, bear- 
ing ten thousand men stricken with pestilence and death ; of the 
rest some were sunk, some dashed to pieces against the Irish clifis. 
The wreckers of the Orkneys and the Faroes, the clansmen of the 
Scottish isles, the kerns of Donegal and Galway, all had their 
part in the work of murder and robbery. Eight thousand Span- 
iards perished between the Giant's Causeway and the Blaskets. 
On a strand near Sligo an English captain numbered eleven hun- 
dred corpses Avhich had been cast up by the sea. The flower of 
the Spanish nobility, who had been sent on the new crusade under 
Alonzo da Leyva, after twice suffering shipwreck, put a third time 
to sea to founder on a reef near Dumblane. 



Section "VII.— Tlie Elizabethan Poets. 

{Authorities. — For a general account of this period, see Mr. Morley's admirable 
"First Sketch of English Literature," Hallam's "Literary History," M. Taine's 
"Histoiy of English Literature," etc. Mr. Craik has elaborately illustrated the 
works of Spenser, and full details of the history of our early di'ama may be found in 
Mr. Collier's "History of English Dramatic Literature to the Time of Shakspere." 
Malone's inquiry remains tlie completest investigation into the history of Shakspere's 
dramas ; and the works of Mr. Armytage Brown and Mr. Gerald Massey contain 



422 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the latest tlieories as to the sonnets. 
works, -with the notes of Giftbrd, etc.] 



For Ben Jonson and his fellows, see their 



We have already watched the shy revival of English letters 
during the earlier half of Elizabeth's reigu. The general awaken- 
ing of national life, the increase of wealth, of refinement and 
leisure, which marked that period, luid been accompanied, as we 
have seen, by a quickening of English intelligence, whicli found 
vent in an upgrowth of grammar schools, in the new impulse giv- 
en to classical learning at the universities, in a passion for trans- 
lations, which familiarized all England with the masterpieces of 
Italy and Greece, and above all in the crude but vigorous eiforts 
of Sackville and Lyly after a nobler poetry and prose. But to 
these local and peculiar influences was to be added a more gen- 
eral influence, that of the restlessness and curiosity wliich charac- 
terized the age. The sphere of human interest was widened as 
it had never been widened before or since by the revelation of a 
new heaven and a new earth. It was only in the later j'ears of the 
sixteenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus were brought 
home to the general intelligence of the world by Kepler and Galileo, 
or that the daring of the buccaneers broke through the veil which 
the greed of Spain had drawn across the New World of Columbus. 
Hardly inferior to these revelations as a source of poetic impulse 
was the sudden and picturesque way in which the various races of 
the world were brought face to face with one another thi'ough the 
universal passion for foreign travel. Y/hile the red tribes of tlie 
West were described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the strange civ-' 
ilization of Mexico and Peru disclosed by Cortez and Pizarro, the 
voyages of the Portuguese threw open the older splendors of the 
East, and the story of India and China was told for the first time 
to Christendom by Mafiei and Mendoza. England took her full 
part in this work of discovery. Jenkinson, an English traveler, 
made his way to Bokhara. Willoughby brought back Muscovy 
to the knowledge of Western Europe. English mariners penetra- 
ted among the Esquimaux, or settled in Virginia. Drake circum- 
navigated the globe. The " Collection of Voyages," which was 
j^ublished by Hakluyt, not only disclosed the vastness of the world 
itself, but the infinite number of the races of mankind, the varie- 
ty of their laws, their customs, their religions, their very instincts. 
We see the influence of this new and wider knowledge of the 
world, not only in the life and richness which it gave to the imag- 
ination of the time, but in the immense interest which from this 
moment attached itself to man. Shakspere's conception of Cali- 
ban, as well as the questionings of Montaigne, mark the beginning 
of a new and a truer, because a more inductive, philosophy of human 
nature and human history. The fascination exercised by the study 
of human character showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet 
more in the wonderful popularity of the drama. And to these 
larger and world-wide sources of poetic powers was added in En- 
gland, at the moment which we have reached in its story, the im- 



VII.] 



TEE EEFORMATION. 



423 



pulse wliich sprang from national triumph. The victory over the 
Armada, the deliverance from Spain, the rolling away of the Cath- 
olic terror which had hung like a cloud over the hopes of the new 
people, was like a passing from death into life. The whole aspect 
of England suddenly changed. As yet the interest of Elizabeth's 
reign had been political and material; the stage had been crowd- 
ed with statesmen and warriors — with Cecils, and Walsinghams, 
and Drakes. Literature had hardly found .a place in the glories 
of the time. But from the moment when the Armada drifted back 
broken to Ferrol the figures of warriors and statesmen were dwarf- 
ed by the grander figures of poets and philosophers. Amid the 
throng in Elizabeth's antechamber the noblest form is that of the 
singer who lays the " Faerie Queen" at her feet, or of the young 
lawyer who muses amid the splendors of the presence over the 
problems of the. " Novum Organon." The triumph of Cadiz, the 
conquest of Ireland, pass unheeded as we Avatch Hooker building- 
up his "Ecclesiastical Polity" among the sheepfolds, or the genius 
of Shakspere rising year by year into supremer grandeur in a rude 
theatre beside the Thames. 

The full glory of the new literature broke on England with Ed- 
mund Spenser, We know little of his life ; he was born in East 
London of poor parents, but connected Avith the S^sensers of Al- 
thorpe, even then, as he proudly says, " a house of ancient fame." 
He studied as a sizar at Cambridge, and quitted the university, 
while still a boy, to live as a tutor in the North ; but after some 
years of obscure poverty the scorn of a fair "Rosalind" drove 
him again southward. A college friendship with Gabriel Harvey 
served to introduce him to Lord Leicester, who sent him as his 
envoy into France, and in whose service he first became acquaint- 
ed with Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. From Sidney's 
house at Penshurst came his earliest work, "The Shepherd's Cal- 
endar;" in form like Sidney's own "Arcadia," a pastoral, where 
love and loyalty and Puritanism jostled oddly Avith the fancied 
shepherd life. The peculiar melody and profuse imagination Avhich 
the pastoral disclosed at once placed its author in the forefront of 
living poets, but a far greater work was already in hand ; and from 
some words of Gabriel Harvey's we see Spenser bent on rivaling 
Ariosto, and even hoping " to overgo" the " Orlando Furioso," 
in his "Elvish Queen," The ill-will or indifference of Burleigh, 
however, blasted the expectations he had drawn from the patron- 
age of Sidney or the Earl of Leicester, and the favor with which 
he had been welcomed by the Queen. Sidney, himself in disgrace 
with Elizabeth, Avithdrew to Wilton to Avrite the "Arcadia," by his 
sister's side; and "discontent of my long fruitless stay in princes' 
courts," the poet tells us, "and expectation vain of idle hopes," 
drove Spenser at last into exile. He folloAved Lord Grey as his 
secretary into Ireland, and remained there on the deputy's recall 
in the enjoyment of an of&ce and a grant of land from the forfeited 
estates of the Earl of Desmond. Spenser had thus enrolled him- 
self among the colonists to Avhom England Avas looking at the time 
for the regeneration of Southern Ireland, and the practical interest 



424 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[ClIAP. 



be took in the "barren soil wbere cold and want and poverty do 
grow" was shown by the later publication of a prose tractate on 
the condition and government of the island. It was at Dublin or in 
his castle of Kilcolman, two miles from Doneraile, " under the fall 
of Mole, that mountain hoar," that he spent the memorable years 
in which Mary fell on the scaffold and the Armada came and went ; 
and it was in the latter home that Walter Raleigh found him sit- 
ting " alwaies idle," as it seemed to his restless friend, " among the 
cooly shades of the green alders by the MuHa's shore," in a'visit 
made memorable by the poem of " Colin Clout's come Home 
again." But in the " idlesse" and solitude of the poet's exile the 
great work begun in the two pleasant years of his stay at Pens- 
hurst had at last taken form, and it was to publish the first three 
books of the "Faerie Queen" that Spenser returned in Raleigh's 
company to London. 

The appearance of the "Faerie Queen" is the one critical event 
in the annals of English poetry ; it settled, in fact, the question 
whether there was to be such a thing as English poetry or not. The 
older national verse which had blossomed and died in Caedmon 
sprang suddenly into a grander life in Chaucer, but it closed again 
in a yet more complete death. Across the border, indeed, the 
Scotch poets of the fifteenth century preserved something of their 
master's vivacity and color, and in England itself the Italian po- 
etry of the Renascence had of late found echoes in Surrey and Sid- 
ney. The new English drama too, as we shall presently see, was 
beginning to display its wonderful powers, and the work of Mar- 
lowe had already prepared the way for the work of Shakspere. 
But bright as was the promise of coming song, no great imagina- 
tive poem had broken the silence of English literature for nearly 
two hundred years when Spenser landed at Bristol with the "Fae- 
rie Queen." From that moment the stream of Englisli poetry has 
flowed on without a break. There have been times, as in the years 
which immediately followed, when England has " become a nest 
of singing birds;" there have been times when song was scant and 
poor ; but there never has been a time when England was wholly 
without a singer. The new English verse has been true to the 
source from which it sprang, and Spenser has always been "the 
poet's poet." But in his own day he was the poet of England 
at large. The "Faerie Queen" was received with a burst of gen- 
eral welcome. It became " the delight of every accomplished 
gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier." 
The poem expressed, indeed, the very life of the time. It was with 
a true poetic instinct that Spenser fell back for the frame-work of 
his story on the fairy world of Celtic romance, whose wonder and 
mj^stery had in fact become the truest picture of the wonder and 
mystery of the world around him. In the age of Cortez and of 
Raleigh dream-land had ceased to be dream-land, and no marvel or 
adventure that befell lady or knight was stranger than the talcs 
which weather-beaten mariners from the Southern seas were tell- 
ing every day to grave merchants upon 'Change. The very in- 
congruities of the story of Arthur and his knighthood, strangely 



VII.] 



THE BEFOEMATIOK. 



425 



as it had been built up out of the rival efforts of bard and jongleur 
and priest, made it the fittest vehicle for the expression of the 
world of incongruous feeling which we call the Renascence. To 
modern eyes perhaps there is something grotesque in the strange 
medley of figures which crowd the canvas of the " Faerie Queen," 
in its fauns dancing on the sward where knights have hurtled to- 
gether, in its alternation of the salvageraen from the ISTew World 
with the satyrs of classic mythology, in the giants, dwarfs, and 
monsters of popular fancy, who jostle with the nymphs of Greek 
legend and the damosels of mediaeval romance. But, strange as 
the medley is, it reflects truly enough the stranger medley of war- 
ring ideals and irreconcilable impulses which made np the life of 
Spenser's contemporaries. It was not in the "Faerie Queen" onlj^, 
but in the world which it portrayed, that the religious mysticism 
of the Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual free- 
dom of the Revival of Letters, that asceticism and self-denial cast 
their spell on imaginations growing with the sense of varied and 
inexhaustible existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of 
feeling which expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry 
coexisted with the rough practical energy that sprang from an 
awakening sense of human power, or the lawless extravagance of 
an idealized friendship and love with the moral sternness and el- 
evation which England was drawing from the Reformation and 
the Bible. But strangely contrasted as are the elements of the 
poem, they are harmonized by the calmness and serenity Avhich is 
the note of the " Faerie Queen." The world of the Renascence 
is around us, but it is ordered, refined, and calmed by the poet's 
touch. The warmest scenes which he borrows from the Italian 
verse of his day are idealized into purity; the very struggle of the 
men around him is lifted out of its pettier accidents, and raised 
into a spiritual oneness with the struggle in the soul itself There 
are allusions in plenty to contemporary events, but the contest 
between Elizabeth and Mary takes ideal form in that of Una and 
the false Duessa, and the clash of arms between Spain and the 
Huguenots comes to us faint and hushed through the serener air. 
The verse, like the story, rolls on as by its own natural power, 
without haste or effort or delay. The gorgeous coloring, the pro- 
fuse and often complex imagery which Spenser's imagination lav- 
ishes, leave no sense of confusion in the reader's mind. Every 
figure, strange as it may be, is seen clearly and distinctlj^ as it 
passes by. It is in this calmness, this serenity, this spiritual el- 
evation of the "Faerie Queen," that we feel the new life of tlie 
coming age moulding into ordered and harmonious form the life 
of the Renascence. Both in its conception, and in the Avay in 
which this conception is realized in the portion of his work which 
Spenser completed, his poem strikes the note of the coming Pu- 
ritanism, In his earlier pastoral, " Tlie Shepherd's Calendar," the 
poet had boldly taken his part with the more advanced Reformers 
against the Church policy of the Court. He had chosen Arch- 
bishop Grindal, who was then in disgrace for his Puritan sympa- 
thies, as his model of a Christian pastor; and attacked with sharp 



426 



BISTOBY OF THE ENGLISH FEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



invective the pomp of the higher clergy. His " Faerie Queen," in 
its religious theory, is Puritan to the core. The worst foe of its 
" Red-cross Knight" is the false and scarlet-clad Duessa of Home, 
who parts him for a while from Truth and leads him to the house 
of Ignorance. Spenser presses strongly and pitilessly for the ex- 
ecution of Mary Stuart. No bitter word ever breaks the calm of 
his verse save when it touches on the perils with which Catholi- 
cism was environing England, perils before which his knight must 
fall " were not that Heavenly Grace doth him uphold and stead- 
fast Truth acquite him out of all." But it is yet more in the 
temper and aim of his work that we catch the nobler and deeper 
tones of English Puritanism. In his earlier musings at Penshurst 
the poet had purposed to surpass Ariosto, but the gayety of Arios- 
to's song is utterly absent from his own. Not a ripple of laughter 
breaks the calm surface of Spensers verse. He is habitually seri- 
ous, and the seriousness of his poetic tone reflects the seriousness 
of his poetic purpose. His aim, he tells xis, was to represent the 
moral virtues, to assign to each its knightly patron, so that its ex- 
cellence might be expressed and its contrary vice trodden under- 
foot by deeds of arms and chivalry. In knight after kniglit of the 
twelve he purposed to paint, he wished to embody some single 
virtue of the virtuous man in its struggle with the faults and er- 
rors which specially beset it; till in Arthur, the sum of the whole 
company, man might have been seen perfected, in his longing and 
progress toward the "Faerie Queen," the Divine Glory which is 
the true end of human effort. The largeness of his culture indeed, 
his exquisite sense of beauty, and above all the very intensity of 
his moral enthusiasm, saved Spenser from the narrowness and ex»- 
aggeration which often distorted goodness into unloveliness in the 
Puritan. Christian as he is to the core, his Christianity is enrich- 
ed and fertilized by the larger temper of the Renascence, as well 
as by a poet's love of the natural world in which the older mythol- 
ogies struck their roots. Diana and the gods of heathendom 
take a sacred tinge from the jjurer sanctities of the new faith ; 
and in one of the greatest songs of the "Faerie Queen," the con- 
ception of love widens, as it widened in the mind of a Greek, into 
the miglity thought of the productive energy of nature. Spenser 
borrows in fact the delicate and refined forms of the Platonist 
philosophy to express his own moral enthusiasm, Not only does 
he love, as others have loved, all that is noble and inn-e and of good 
report, but he is fired as none before or after him have been fired 
with a passionate sense of moral beauty. Justice, Temperance, 
Truth, are no mere names to him, but real existences to which his 
whole nature clings with a rapturous affection. Outer beauty he 
believed to spring, and loved because it sprang, from the beauty 
of the soul within. There was much in such a moral protest as 
this to rouse dislike in any age, but it is the glory of the age of 
Elizabeth that, "mad world" as in many ways it was, all that was 
noble welcomed the "Faerie Queen." Elizabeth herself, says 
Spenser, "to mine open pipe inclined her ear," and bestowed a 
pension on the poet. He soon returned to Ireland, to commemo- 



VIL] 



THE BEFOBMATION. 



42 7 



rate his marriage in sonnets and the most beautiful of bridal 
songs, and to complete three more books of his poem among love 
and poverty and troubles from his Irish neighbors. Trouble was, 
indeed, soon to take a graver form. Spenser was still at work on 
the "Faerie Queen" when the Irish discontent broke into revolt, 
and the poet escaped from his burning house to fly to England, and 
to die broken-hearted, it may be — as Jonson says — "for want of 
bread," in an inn at Westminster. 

If the "Faerie Queen" expressed tlie higher elements of the 
Elizabethan age, the whole of that age, its lower elements and its 
higher alike, was expressed in the English drama. We have al- 
ready pointed out the circumstances Avhich every where through- 
out Europe were giving a poetic impulse to the newly-aroused in- 
telligence of men, and it is remarkable that this impulse every 
where took a dramatic shape. The artificial French tragedy 
which began about tliis time with Garnier was not, indeed, destined 
to exert any influence over English poetry till a later age ; but the 
influence of the Italian comedy, which had begun half a century 
earlier with Machiavelli and Ariosto, was felt directly through the 
novelle, or stories, which served as plots for the dramatists. It 
left its stamp indeed on some of the worst characteristics of the 
English stage. The features of our drama that startled the moral 
temper of the time and won the deadly hatred of the Puritan, its 
grossness and profanity, its tendency to scenes of horror and crime, 
its profuse employment of cruelty and lust as grounds of dramatic 
action, its daring use of the horrible and the unnatural whenever 
they enable it to display the more terrible and revolting sides of 
human passion, were derived from the Italian stage. It is doubt- 
ful how much the English playwrights may have owed to the 
Spanish drama, that under Lope and Cervantes sprang suddenly 
into a grandeur which almost rivaled their own. In the inter- 
mixture of tragedy and comedy, in the abandonment of the sol- 
emn uniformity of poetic diction for the colloquial language of real 
life, the use of unexpected incidents, the complications of their 
plots and intrigues, the dramas of England and Spain are remark- 
ably alike ; but the likeness seems rather to have sprung from a 
similarity in the circumstances to which both owed their rise, than 
from any direct connection of the one with the other. The real or- 
igin of the English drama, in fact, lay not in any influence from 
without, but in the influence of England itself. The temper of the 
nation was dramatic. Ever since the Reformation, the Palace, the 
Inns of Court, and the University had been vying with one an- 
other in the production of plays ; and so early was their popular- 
ity that even under Henry the Eighth it was found necessary to 
create a "master of the revels" to supervise them. Every prog- 
ress of Elizabeth from shire to shire was a succession of shows and 
interludes. Dian with her nymphs met the Queen as she returned 
from hunting ; Love presented her with his golden arrow as she 
passed through the gates of Norwich. From the earlier years of 
her reign, the new spirit of the Renascence had been pouring itself 
into the rough mould of the mystery plays, whose allegorical vir- 



428 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



tues and vices, or Scriptural heroes and heroines, had handed on 
the spirit of the drama through the Middle Ages. Adaptations 
from classical pieces soon began to alternate with the purely re- 
ligious "moralities;" and an attempt at a livelier style of expres- 
sion and inA^ention appeared in the popular comedy of " Gammer 
Gurton's Needle;" while Sackville, Lord Dorset, in his tragedy of 
"Gorbeduc" made a bold effort at sublimity of diction, and intro- 
duced the use of blank verse as the vehicle of dramatic dialogue. 
But it was not to these tentative efforts of scholars and nobles 
that the English stage was really indebted for the amazing out- 
burst of genius, which dates from the moment when "the Eavl of 
Leicester's servants" erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. 
It was the people itself that created its stage. The theatre, in- 
deed, Avas commonly only the court-yard of an inn, or a mere booth 
such as is still seen at a country fair; the bulk of the audience sat 
beneath the open sky in the " pit" or yard ; a few covered seats in 
the galleries which ran round it formed the boxes of the wealthier 
spectators, while patrons and nobles found seats upon the actual 
boards. All the appliances were of the roughest sort: a few flow- 
ers served to indicate a garden, crowds and armies were repre- 
sented by a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers, heroes 
rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a post told wheth- 
er the scene Avas at Athens or London, There were no female act- 
ors, and the grossness which startles us in words which fell from 
women's lips took a different color when every woman's part Avas 
acted by a boy. But difficulties such as these were more than 
compensated by the popular character of the drama itself Rude 
as the theatre might be, all the world was there. The stage was 
croAvded Avith nobles and courtiers. Apprentices and citizens 
thronged the benches in the yard below. . The rough mob of the 
pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid transitions, the 
passionate energy, the reality, the life-like medley and confusion, 
the racy dialogue, the chat, the Avit,.the pathos, the sublimity, the 
rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors and vulgar bloodshedding, 
the immense range over all classes of society, the intimacy Avith 
the foulest as Avell as the fairest developments of human temper, 
which characterized the English stage. The new drama repre- 
sented "the very age and body of the time, his form and press- 
ure." The people itself brought its nobleness and its vileness to 
the boards. ISTo stage Avas ever so human, no poetic life so intense. 
Wild, reckless, defiant of all past tradition, of all conventional 
laAvs, the English dramatists owned no teacher, no source of poetic 
inspiration, but the people itself. 

FcAV events in our literary history are so startling as this sud- 
den rise of the Elizabethan drama. The first public theatre, as we 
have seen, was erected only in the middle of the Queen's reign. 
Before the close of it eighteen theatres existed in London alone. 
Fifty dramatic poets, many of the first order, appeared in the fifty 
years Avhich precede the closing of the theatres by the Puritans ; 
and great as is the number of their Avorks which have perished, 
Ave still possess a hundred dramas, all Avritten Avithin this period. 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



429 



and of which at least a half are excellent, A glance. at their au- 
thors shows us that the intellectual quickening of the age had now 
reached the mass of the people. Almost all of the new playwrights 
were fairly educated, and many were university men. But, in- 
stead of courtly singers of the Sidney and Spenser sort, w^e see the 
advent of the "poor scholar." The earlier dramatists, such as 
Nash, Peele, Kyd, Greene, and Marlowe, were for the most part 
poor, and reckless in their poverty ; wild livers, defiant of law or 
common fame, in revolt against the usages and religion of their day, 
" atheists" in general repute, " holding Moses for a juggler," haunt- 
ing the brothel and the ale-house, and dying starved or in tavern 
brawls. But with their appearance began the Elizabethan drama. 
The few plays which have reached us of an earlier date are either 
cold imitations of the classical and Italian comedy, or rude farces 
like "Ralph Roister Doister," or tragedies such as "Gorbednc," 
where, poetic as occasional passages may be, there is little promise 
of dramatic development. But in the year which preceded the 
coming of the Armada the whole aspect of the stage suddenly 
changes, and the new dramatists range themselves around two men 
of very different genius, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe. 
Of Greene, as the creator of our lighter English prose, we have al- 
ready spoken. But his work as a poet was of yet greater impor- 
tance. No figure better paints the group of young playwrights. 
He left Cambridge to travel through Italy and Spain, and to bring- 
back the debauchery of the one and the skepticism of the other. 
In the words of remorse he wrote before his death he paints him- 
self as a drunkard and a roisterer, winning money only by cease- 
less pamphlets and plays to waste it on wine and M'omen, and 
drinking the cuj) of life to the dregs. Hell and the after- world 
were the butts of his ceaseless mockery. If he had not feared the 
judges of the Queen's courts more than he feared God, he said, 
in bitter jest, he should often have turned cutpurse. He married, 
and loved his wife, but she wa,s soon deserted ; and the wretched 
profligate found himself again plunged into excesses which he 
loathed, though he could not live without them. Bat wild as was 
the life of Greene, his pen was pure. He is steadily on virtue's 
side in the love pamphlets and novelettes he poured out in endless 
succession, and whose plots were dramatized by the school Avhich 
gathered round him. His keen perception of character and the 
relations of social life, the playfulness of his fancy, and the liveli- 
ness of his style exerted an influence on his contemporaries hardly 
inferior to that of Marlowe. The life of Marlowe was as riotous, 
Ills skepticism even more daring, than the life and skepticism of 
Greene. His early death alone saved him, in all probability, from 
a prosecution for atheism. He was charged with calling Moses a 
juggler, and with boasting that, if he undertook to write a new 
religion, it should be a better religion than the Christianity he saw 
around him. But in a far higher degree than Greene he is the 
creator of the English drama. Born at the opening of Elizabeth's 
reign, the son of a Canterbury shoe-maker, but educated at Cam- 
bridge, Marlowe burst on the world, in the year which preceded 



430 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the triumph^over the Armada, "with a play which at once wrought 
a revolution in the English stage. 13orabastic and extravagant 
as it was, and extravagance reached its height in the scene where 
captive kings, the " pampered jades of Asia," drew their conquer- 
or's car across the stage, "Tamburlaine" not only indicated the 
revolt of the new drama against the timid inanities of euphu- 
ism, but gave an earnest of that imaginative daring, tlie secret of 
which Marlowe was to bequeath to the playwrights who followed 
him. He pei'ished at thirty in a shameful brawl, but in his bi'ief 
career he had struck the gi*ander notes of the coming drama. His 
Jew of Malta was the herald of Shylock. He opened in "Edward 
the Second" the sei'ies of historical plays which gave us " Cassar" 
and " Richard the Third." Riotous, grotesque, and full of a mad 
thirst for pleasure as it is, his " Faustus" was the first dramatic at- 
tempt to touch the great problem of the relations of man to the 
unseen world, to paint the power of doubt in a temper leavened 
with superstition, the daring of human defiance in a heart aban- 
doned to despair. Rash, unequal, stooping even to the ridiculous 
in his cumbrous and vulgar bufibonery, there is a force in Marlowe, 
a conscious grandeur of tone, a range of passion, which set him 
above all his contemporaries save one. In the higher qualities of 
imagination, as in the majesty and sweetness of his "mighty line," 
he is inferior to Shakspere alone. 

A few daring jests, a brawl and a fiital stab, make up the life of 
Marlowe ; but even details such as these are Avanting to the life 
of William Shakspere. Of hardly any great poet, indeed, do we 
know so little. For the story of his youth we have only one or 
two trifling legends, and these almost certainly false. Not a sin-* 
gle letter or characteristic saying, not one of the jests " spoken at 
the Mermaid," hardly a single anecdote, remains to illustrate his 
busy life in London. His look and figure in later age have been 
preserved by the bust over his tomb at Stratford, and a hundred 
years after his death he was still remembered in his native town ; 
but the minute diligence of the inquirers of the Georgian time 
was able to glean hardly a single detail, even of the most trivial 
order, which could throw light upon the years of retirement be- 
fore his death. It is owing perhaps to the harmony and unity of 
his temper that no salient peculiarity seems to have left its trace 
on the memory of his contemporaries ; it is the very grandeur of 
his genius which precludes us from discovering any personal trait 
in his works. His supposed self-revelation in the Sonnets is so 
obscure that only a few outlines can be traced even by the bold- 
est conjecture. In his dramas he is all his characters, and his 
characters range over all mankind. There is not one, or the act 
or word of one, that we can identify personally with the poet him- 
self. 

He was born in the sixth year of Elizabeth's reign, twelve years 
after the b.irth of Spenser, three years later than the birth of Ba- 
con. Marlowe was of the same age with Shakspere; Greene prob- 
ably a few years older. His father, a glover and small farmer of 
Stratford-on-Avon, was forced by poverty to lay down his ofiice 



vn.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



431 



of alderman, as his son reached boyhood ; and the stress of pov- 
erty may have been the cause whicli drove William Shakspere, 
who was already rdarried at eighteen to a wife older than himself, 
to Loudon and the stage. His life in the capital is said (but the 
statement is mere guesswork) to have begun in his twenty-third 
year, the memorable year which followed Sidney's death, which 
preceded the coming of the Armada, and which witnessed the pro- 
duction of Marlowe's " Tamburlaine." If we take the language 
of the Sonnets as a record of his personal feeling, his new profes- 
sion as an actor stirred in him only the bitterness of self-contempt. 
He chides with Fortune, " that did not better for my life provide 
than public means that public manners breed ;" he writhes at the 
thought that he has "made himself a motley to the view" of the 
gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars. " Thence comes it," 
he adds, " that my name receives a brand, and almost thence my 
nature is subdued to that it works in," But the application of 
the words is a more than doubtful one. In spite of petty squab- 
bles with some of his dramatic rivals at the outset of his career, 
the genial nature of the new-comer seems to have won him a gen- 
eral love among his fellow-actors. In his early years, while still 
a mere fitter of old plays for the stage, a fellow-playwright, Chet- 
tle, answered Greene's attack on him in words of honest affection : 
"Myself have seen his demeanor no less civil, than he excellent in 
the quality he professes: besides, divers of worshij) have reported 
his uprightness of dealing, which augurs his honesty; and his fa- 
cetious grace in writing, that approves his art," His partner Bur- 
bage spoke of him after death as a "worthy friend and fellow;" 
and Jonson handed down the general tradition of his time when 
he described him as " indeed honest, and of an open and free na- 
ture." 

His profession as an actor was at any rate of essential service 
to him in the poetic career which he soon undertook, Not only 
did it give him the sense of theatrical necessities which makes his 
plays so effective on the boards, but it enabled him to bring his 
pieces as he wrote them to the test of the stage. If there is any 
truth in Jonson's statement that Shakspere never blotted a line, 
there is no justice in the censure which it implies on his careless- 
ness or incorrectness. The conditions of poetic publication were 
in fact wholly different from those of our own day. A drama re- 
mained for years in manuscript as an acting piece, subject to con- 
tinual revision and amendment; and every rehearsal and represen- 
tation afforded hints for change, which we know the young poet 
was far from neglecting. The chance which has preserved an 
earlier edition of his " Hamlet" shows in what an unsparing way 
Shakspere could recast even the finest products of his genius. 
Five years after the supposed date of his arrival in London, he 
was already famous as a dramatist, Greene speaks bitterly of 
him, under the name of " Shakescene," as an "upstart crow beauti- 
fied with our feathers," a sneer which points to a time when the 
young author was preparing himself for loftier flights by fitting 
older pieces of his predecessors for the stage. He was soon part- 



432 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ner in the theatre, actor, and playwright ; and anotlier nickname, 
that of "Johannes Factotum," or Jack of all Trades, shows his read- 
iness to take all honest work which came to hand. " Pericles" and 
"Titus Andronicus" are probably instances of almost worthless 
but popular plays touched up with a few additions from Shaks- 
pere's pen; and of the Second and Third Parts of "Henry the 
Sixth" only about a third can be traced to him. The death scene 
of Cardinal Beaufort, though chosen by Reynolds in his famous 
picture as specially Shaksperian, is taken bodily from some older 
dramatist, Marlowe perhaps, or Peele, whom Shakspere was adapt- 
ing for the stage. 

With the poem of "Venus and Adonis," "the first heir of my 
invention," as he calls it, the period of independent creation fairly 
began. The date of its publication was a very memorable one. 
The "Faerie Queen" had appeared only three years before, and 
had placed Spenser, without a rival, at the head of English poetry. 
On the other hand, the two leading dramatists of the time passed 
at this moment suddenly away. Greene died in poverty and self- 
reproach in the house of a poor shoe-maker. "Doll," he Avrote to 
the Avife he had abandoned, "I charge thee, by the love of our 
youth and by my soul's rest, that tboa wilt see this man paid ; for 
if he and his wife had not succored me, I had died in the streets." 
" Oh, that a year were granted me to live !" cried the young jjoet 
from his bed of death — "but I must die, of every man abhorred ! 
Time, loosely spent, will not again be won ! My time is loosely 
spent — and I undone !" A year later, the death of Marlowe in a 
street brawl removed the only rival Avhose jDOwers might have 
equaled Shakspere's own. He was now about thirty ; and the 
twenty-three years which elapsed between the appearance of the 
"Adonis" and his death Avere filled Avitli a series of masterpieces. 
Nothing is more characteristic of his genius than its incessant ac- 
tivity. Throughout the Avhole of this period he produced on an 
average two dramas a year, and this in addition to the changes 
and transformations he efi^ected in those already brought on the 
stage. When we attempt, hoAvever, to trace the growth and 
progress of the poet's mind in the order of his plays Ave are met, 
at least in the case of many of them, by an absence of an}"- real in- 
formation as to the dates of their appearance, Avhich is hardly 
compensated by the guesses of later inquirers. The facts oyi wliich 
conjecture has to build are indeed extremely fcAv. "Venus and 
Adonis," Avith the " Lucrece," must have been Avritten before their 
publication in 1593-'94; the Sonnets, though not published till 1609, 
were knoAvn in some form among his private friends as early as 
1598. His earlier plays are defined by a list given in the "Wit's 
Treasury" of Francis Meres in 1598, though the omission of a play 
from a casual catalogue of this kind Avould hardly Avarrant us in 
assuming its necessary non-existence at the time. The Avorks 
ascribed to him at his death are fixed, in the same appi'oxiniate 
fashion, through the edition published by his fellow-actors. Be- 
yond these meagre foots, and our knowledge of the publication of 
a few of his dramas in his lifetime, all is uncertain ; and the con- 



VII.] 



THE BEFOEMATWN. 



43^ 



elusions which have been drawn from these, and from the dramas 
themselves, as well as from assumed resemblances with, or refer- 
ences to, other plays of the period can only be accepted as rough 
approximations to the truth. His lighter comedies and historical 
dramas can be assigned with fair probability to the period be- 
tween 1593, when he was known as nothing more tlian an adapter, 
and 1598, Avhen they are mentioned in the list of Meres. They 
bear on them indeed the stamp of youth. In "Love's Labor's Lost" 
the young playwright quizzes the verbal wit and high-flown ex- 
travagance of thought and phrase which Euphues had made fash- 
ionable in the court world of the time ; his fun breaks almost riot- 
ously out in the practical jokes of the " Taming of the Shrew" and 
the endless blunderings of the " Comedy of Errors." His work is 
as yet marked by little poetic elevation, or by passion ; but the 
easy grace of the dialogue, the dexterous management of a compli- 
cated story, the genial gayety of his tone, and the music of his 
verse, placed Shakspere at once at the head of his fellows as a 
master of social comedy. In the " Two Gentlemen of Verona," 
which followed, perhaps, these earlier efforts, his painting of man- 
ners is sutFused by a tenderness and ideal beauty, which formed 
an eiiective protest against the hard though vigorous character- 
painting which the first success of Ben Jonson in " Every Man in 
his Humor" brought at the time into fashion. Quick on these light- 
er comedies followed two, in which his genius started fully into 
life. His poetic power, held in reserve till now, showed itself with 
a splendid profusion in the brilliant fancies of the "Midsummer 
Night's Dream ;" and passion swept like a tide of resistless delight 
through "Komeo and Juliet." Side by side, however, with these 
delicate imaginings and piquant sketches of manners, had been ap- 
pearing during this short interval of intense activity his historical 
dramas. No plays seem to have been more popular, from the ear- 
liest hours of the new stage, than dramatic representations of our 
history. Marlowe had shown in his "Edward the Second" what 
tragic grandeur could be reached in this favorite field ; and, as we 
have seen, Shakspere had been led naturally toward it by his ear- 
lier occupation as an adapter of stock pieces like "Henry the 
Sixth" for the new requirements of the stage. He still to some 
extent followed in plan the older plays on the subjects he selected, 
but in his treatment of their themes he shook boldly oflT the yoke 
of the past. A larger and deeper conception of human character 
than any of the old dramatists had reached displayed itself in 
Richard the Third, in Falstafi", or in Hotspur ; while in Constance 
and Richard the Second the pathos of human sufiei-ing was paint- 
ed as even Marlowe had never dared to paint it. No dramas have 
done more for his enduring popularity with the mass of English- 
men than these historical plays of Shakspere ; echoing sometimes, 
as they do, much of our national prejudice and unfairness of tem- 
per (as in his miserable caricature of Joan of Arc), but instinct 
throughout with English humor, with an English love of hard 
fighting, an English faith in the doom that waits upon triumph- 
ant evil, and English pity for the fallen. 

28 



434 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Whether as a tragedian or as a writer of social comedy, Shaks- 
pere had now passed far beyond his fellows. "The Muses," said 
Meres, " would speak with Shakspere's fine filed phrase, if they 
would speak English." His personal popularity was at its height. 
His pleasant temper, and the vivacity of his wit, had drawn him 
early into contact with the young Earl of Southampton, to whom 
his "Adonis" and "Lucrece" are dedicated; and the different tone 
of the two dedications shows how rapidly acquaintance ripened 
into an ardent friendship. It is probably to Southampton that 
the earlier sonnets were addressed during this period, while others 
may have been written in the character of his friend during the 
quickly changing phases of the Earl's adventurous life. His 
wealth, too, was growing fast. A year after the appearance of his 
two poems the dramatic company at Blackfriars, in which he was 
a partner as well as actor, built their new theatre of the Globe on 
the Baukside ; and four years later he was rich enough to aid his 
father, and buy the house at Stratford which afterward became his 
home. The tradition that Elizabeth was so pleased with Falstaff 
in "Plenry the Fourth" that she ordered the poet to show her 
Falstaii' in love — an order which produced the "Merry Wives of 
Windsor" — whether true or false, shows his repute as a play- 
wright. As the group of earlier poets passed away, they found 
successors in Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, and Chn])- 
man, and above all in Ben Jonson. But none of these could dis- 
pute the supremacy of Shakspere. The verdict of Meres in 1598, 
that " Shakspere among the English is the most excellent in both 
kinds for the stage," represented the general feeling of his con- 
temporaries. He was fully master at last of the resources of his 
art. "The Merchant of Venice" marks the perfection of his de-' 
velopment as a dramatist in the completeness of its stage efiect, 
the ingenuity of its incidents, the ease of its movement, tlie poetic 
beauty of its higher passages, the reserve and self-control with 
which its poetry is used, the conception and development of char- 
acter, and above all the mastery with which character and event 
are grouped round the figure of Shylock. But the poet's temper is 
still young; the "Merry Wives of Windsor" is a burst of gay 
laughter; and laughter more tempered, yet full of a sweeter fasci- 
nation, rings round ns in "As You Like It." But in the melan- 
choly and meditative Jacques of the last drama we feel the touch 
of a new and graver mood. Youth, so full and buoyant in the 
poet till now, seems to have passed almost suddenly away. Shaks- 
pere had nearly reached forty ; and in one of his Sonnets, which 
can not have been written at a much later time than this, there 
are indications that he already felt the advance of premature age. 
The outer world suddenly darkened around him; the briUiant 
circle of young nobles whose friendship he had shared was broken 
up by the political storm which burst in the mad struggle of 
the Earl of Essex for power. Essex himself fell on the scaffold ; 
his friend and Shakspere's idol, Southampton, passed a prisoner 
into the Tower; Herbert, Lord Pembroke, the poet's younger 
patron^ was banished from Court. Hard as it is to read the riddle 



VII.] 



TEE EEFOBMATION. 



435 



of the Essex rising, we know that to some of the younger and more 
chivalrous minds of the age it seemed a noble effort to rescue En- 
gland from intriguers who were gathering round the Queen ; and in 
this effort Shakspere seems to have taken part. The production 
of his play of "Richard the Second" at the theatre was one of the 
means adopted by the conspirators to prepare the nation for the 
revolution they had contemplated ; and the suspension of the play- 
ers, on the suppression of the revolt, marks the Government's opinion 
as to the way their sympathies had gone. While friends were thus 
falling and hopes fading without, the poet's own mind seems to 
have been going through a phase of bitter suffering and unrest. 
In spite of the ingenuity of commentators, it is difficult and even 
impossible to derive any knowledge of Shakspere's inner history 
from the Sonnets ; " the strange imagery of passion which passes 
over the magic mirror," it has been finely said, "has no tangible 
evidence before or behind it ;" but its mere passing is itself an 
evidence of the restlessness and agony within. The change in 
the character of his dramas gives a surer indication of his change 
of mood. " There seems to have been a period in Sliakspere's 
life," says Mr. Hallam, " when his heart was ill at ease, and ill con- 
tent with the world and his own conscience; the memory of hours 
misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the ex- 
perience of man's worser nature which intercourse with unworthy 
associates by choice or circumstances peculiarly teaches, these as 
they sank down into the depth of his great mind seem not only to 
have inspired into it the conception of Lear or Tiraon, but that of 
one primary character — the censurer of mankind. This type is 
first seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jacques, gazing with an 
undiminished serenity and with a gayety of fancy, though not of 
manners, on the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in 
the exiled Duke of the same play, and next one rather more severe 
in the Duke in ' Measure for Measure.' In all these, however, it 
is merely contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet this is mingled 
with the impulses of a jserturbed heart under the pressure of ex- 
traordinary circumstances; it shines no longer, as in the former 
characters, with a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations 
amid feigned gayety and extravagance. In Lear it is the flash of 
sudden inspiration across the incongruous imagery of madness; in 
Timon it is obscured by the exaggeration of misanthropy." 

The " obstinate questionings of invisible things" which had 
given their philosophical cast to the wonderful group of dramas 
Avhich had at last raised Shakspere to his post among the great- 
est of the world's poets, still hung round him in the years of quiet 
retirement which preceded his death. The wealth he had amass- 
ed as actor, stage proprietor, and author enabled him to purchase 
a handsome property at Stratford, the home of his youth, which, if 
we may trust tradition, he had never failed to visit once a year 
since he left it to seek his fortune on the London boards. His last 
dramas, " Othello," "The Tempest," " Csesar," "Antony," "Corio- 
laiuis," were written in the midst of ease and competence, in the 
home where he lived as a country gentleman with his wife and 



430 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



daughters. His classical plays were the last assertion of an age 
which was passing away. The spirit of the Renascence was fad- 
ing before the spirit of the Reformation. Puritanism was hard- 
ening and narrowing, while it Avas invigorating and ennobling, 
life by its stern morality, its seriousness, its conviction of the om- 
nipotence of God and of the v/eakness of man. The old daring 
whicli had turned England into a people of " adventurers," the 
sense of inexhaustible resources in the very nature of man, the 
buoyant freshness of youth, the intoxicating sense of beauty and 
joy, which had created Drake and Sidney and Marlowe, were 
dying with Shakspere himself. The Bible was superseding Plu- 
tarch. The pedantry of euphuism was giving way to the ped- 
antry of Scriptural phrases. The "obstinate questionings of in- 
visible things" which haunted the finer minds of the Renascence, 
were being stereotyped into the theological formulas of the Pre- 
destinarian. A new political world, healthier, more really nation- 
al, but less picturesque, less wrapped in the mystery and splendor 
which jDoets love, was rising with the new moral world. Rifts 
which were still little wei'e widening hour by hour, and threaten- 
ing ruin to the great fabric of Church and State which Elizabeth 
had built up, and to which the men of the Renascence clung pas- 
sionately. From all this new world of feeling and action Shaks- 
pere stood utterly aloof Of the popular tendencies of Puritan- 
ism — and great as were its faults, Puritanism may fairly claim to 
be the first political system which recognized the grandeur of the 
people as a whole — Shakspere knew nothing. In his earlier dra- 
mas he had reflected the common faith of his age in the grandeur 
of kingship as the one national centre; in his later plays he repre-, 
sents the aristocratic view of social life which was shared by all 
the nobler spirits of the Elizabethan time. Coriolanus is the em- 
bodiment of a great noble; and the reiterated taunts which he 
hurls in play after play at the rabble only echo the general tem- 
per of the Renascence. ISTor were the spiritual sympathies of the 
poet those of the coming time. While the Avorld was turning 
more and more to the speculations of theology, man and man's 
nature remained to the last the one inexhaustible subject of inter- 
est with Shakspere, as it had been with his favorite, Montaigne. 
Caliban was his latest creation. It is impossible to discover wheth- 
er his faith, if faith there were, was Catholic or Protestant. It is 
difficult, indeed, to say whether he had any religious belief or not. 
The religious phrases which are thinly scattered over his works 
are little more than expressions of a distant and imaginative rev- 
erence. And on the deeper grounds of religious faith his silence 
is significant. He is silent, and the doubt of Hamlet deepens his 
silence, about the after-world. "To die," it may be, was to him as 
to Claudio, " to go we know not where." Often, at any rate, as his 
"questionings" turn to the riddle of life and death, he leaves it a 
riddle to the last, without heeding the common theological solu- 
tions around him. "We are such stuflTas dreams are made of, and 
our little life is rounded with a sleep." 

The contrast betvreen the spirit of the Elizabethan drama and 



VII.] 



THE EEFOBMATIOX. 



437 



the new temper of the nation "became yet stronger when the 
death of Shakspere left the sovereignty of the English stage to 
Ben Jonson. Jonson retained it almost to the moment when the 
drama itself perished in the storm of the Civil War. Webster 
and Ford, indeed, surpassed him in tragic grandeur, Massinger in 
facility and grace, Beaumont and Fletcher in poetry and invent- 
iveness; but in the breadth of his dramatic quality, his range over 
every kind of poetic excellence, Jonson was excelled by Shaks- 
pere alone. His life retained to the last the riotous, defiant col- 
or of the earlier dramatic world in which he had made his way to 
fame. The step-son of a brick-laj-er, then a poor Cambridge schol- 
ai', he enlisted as a volunteer in the wars of the Low Countries, 
killed his man in single combat in sight of both armies, and re- 
turned at nineteen to London to throw himself on the stage for 
bread. At forty-five he was still so vigorous that he made his 
Avay to Scotland on foot. Even in old age his " mountain belly," 
his scarred face, and massive frame became famous among the 
men of a younger time, as they gathered at the "Mermaid" to list- 
en to his wit, his poetry, his outbursts of spleen and generosity, of 
delicate fancy, of pedantry, of riotous excess. His entry on the 
stage was marked by a proud resolve to reform it. Already a 
fine scholar in early manhood, and disdainful of writers who, like 
Shakspere, knew " small Latin and less Greek," Jonson aimed at 
a return to classic severity, to a severer criticism and taste. He 
blamed the extravagance which marked the poetry around him, 
he studied his plots, he gave symmetry and regularity to his sen- 
tences and conciseness to his phrase. But creativeness disappears: 
in his social comedies we are among qualities and types rather 
than men, among abstractions and not characters. His comedy is 
no genial reflection of life as it is, but a moral, satirical efibrt to 
reform manners. It is only his wonderful grace and real poetic 
feeling that lighten all this pedantry. He shares the vigor and 
buoyancy of life which distinguished the school from which he 
sprang. His stage is thronged with figures. Li spite of his talk 
about correctness, his own extravagance is only saved from be- 
coming ridiculous by his amazing force. If he could not create 
characters, his wealth of striking details gave life to the types 
which he substituted for them. His poetry, too, is of the highest 
order; his lyrics of the purest, lightest fancy; his masques rich 
with gorgeous pictures ; his pastoral, " The Sad Shepherd," frag- 
ment as it is, breathes a delicate tenderness. But, in spite of the 
beauty and strength which lingered on, the life of our drama was 
fast ebbing away. The interest of the people was in reality being 
drawn to newer and graver themes, as the struggle of the Great 
Rebellion threw its shadow before it, and the efforts of the play- 
wrights to arrest this tendency of the time by fresh excitement 
only brought about the ruin of the stage. The grossness of the 
later comedy is incredible. Almost as incredible is the taste of 
the later tragedians for horrors of incest and blood. The hatred 
of the Puritans to the stage was not a mere longing to avenge 
the taunts and insults which the stasre had leveled at Puritan- 



438 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ism; it was in the main the honest hatred of God-fearing men 
against the foulest depravity presented in a poetic and attractive 
form. 



Section VIII.— The Conquest of Ireland. 1588—1610. 

[Authorities. — The materials for the early history of Ireland are described by 
Professor O'Curry iu his "Lectures on the Materials of Ancient Irish History," 
Dublin, 1861. They may be most conveniently studied by the general reader in the 
compilation known as "The Annals of the Four Masters" (Dublin, 1856) edited by 
Dr. O'Donovan. Its ecclesiastical history is dryly but accurately told b}' Dr. Lani- 
gan ("Ecclesiastical History of Ireland," Dublin, 1829). The chief authorities for 
the earlier conquest under Henry the Second are the " Expugnatio et Topographia 
Hibernica," excellently edited for the Rolls Series by Mr. Dimock, and the Anglo- 
Norman poem edited by M. Francisque Michel (London, Pickering, 1857). Mr. 
Froude has devoted especial attention to the relations of Ireland with the Tudors ; 
but both in accuracy and soundness of judgment his work is far inferior to Mr. Brew- 
er's examination of them in his prefaces of the State Papers of Henry the Eighth, or 
to Mr. Gardiner's careful and temperate account of the final conquest and settlement 
under Mountjoy and Chichester (" History of England from the Accession of James 
the First"). The two series of "Lectures on the History of Ireland" by Mr. A. G. 
Richey are remarkable for their information and fairness.] 



While England became " a nest of singing birds" at home, the 
last years of Elizabeth's reign were years of splendor and triumph 
abroad. With the defeat of the Armada began a series of victories 
which broke the power of Spain, and changed the political aspect 
of the world. The exhaustion of tlie royal treasury indeed soon 
forced Elizabeth to content herself with issuing commissions to vol- 
unteers ; but the war was a national one, and the nation waged it. 
for itself In the year after the ruin of the Armada two hundred 
vessels and twenty thousand volunteers gathered at their own cost 
at Plymouth, nnder the command of Drake and IsTorris, plundered 
Corunna, and insulted the Spanish coast, A new buccaneering ex- 
pedition, which had made its way to the West Indies under Drake, 
captured the Spanish galleons, and levied contributions on the rich 
merchant cities of the colonies. PliiliiD was roused by the insult 
to new dreams of invasion, but his threat of a fresh Armada was 
met by a daring descent of the English forces upon Cadiz. The 
town was plundered and burned to the ground; thirteen vessels 
of war were fired in its harbor, and the stores accumulated for the 
expedition utterly destroyed. In spite of this crushing blow a 
Spanish fleet gathered in tlie following year and set sail for the 
English coast ; but, as in tlie case of its predecessor, storms proved 
more fatal than the English guns, and the ships were wrecked and 
almost destroyed in the Bay of Biscay, From this moment it 
was through France, rather than by a direct attack, that Philip 
hoped to reach England, The Armada had hardly been dispersed, 
when the assassination of Henry the Third, the last of the line of 
Valois, raised Henry of Navarre to the throne; and the accession 
of a Protestant sovereign at once ranged the Catholics of France 
to a man on the side of the League and its leaders, the Guises. 
.The League rejected Henry's claims as those of a heretic, admitted 



YII.] 



TSE REFORMATION. 



439 



the ridiculous pretensions which Philip advanced to the vacant 
throne, and received the support of Spanish soldiery and Spanish 
treasure. This new effort of Spain, an effort whose triumph must 
have ended in her ruin, forced Elizabeth to aid Henry with men 
and money in his seven years' struggle against the overwhelming 
odds which seemed arrayed against him ; but valuable as was her 
support, it was by the King's amazing courage and energy that 
victory was at last wrested from his foes. In sj)ite of religious 
passion, the national spirit of France revolted more and more from 
the rule of Spain, and the King's submission to the faith held by 
the bulk of his subjects at last destroyed all chance of Philip's 
success. "Paris is well worth a mass" was the famous phrase in 
which Henry explained his abandonment of the Protestant cause, 
but the step did more than secure Paris. It at once dashed to 
tlie ground all hopes of farther resistance, it dissolved the League, 
and enabled the King at the head of a reunited people to force 
Philip to acknowledge his title and to consent to peace in the 
Treaty of Vervins. 

With the ruin of Philip's projects in France and the assertion 
of English supremacy at sea, all danger from Spain passed quietly 
away, and Elizabeth was able to direct her undivided energies to 
the last work which illustrates her reign. 

To understand, however, the final conquest of Ireland, we must 
retrace our steps to the reign of Henry the Second. The civiliza- 
tion of the island had at that time fallen far below the height 
which it had reached when its missionaries brought religion and 
learning to the shores of ISTorthumbria. Learning had almost dis- 
appeared. The Christianity which had been a vital force in the 
eighth century had died into asceticism and superstition in the 
twelfth, and had ceased to influence the morality of the people at 
large. The Church, destitute of any effective organization, was 
powerless to do the work which it had done elsewhere in West- 
ei'n Europe, or to introduce oi'der into the anarchy of warring 
tribes. On the contrary, it shai'ed the anarchy around it. Its 
head, the Coarb, or Archbishop of Armagh, sank into the heredi- 
tary chieftain of a clan ; its bishops were without dioceses, and 
often mere dependents of the greater monasteries. Hardly a trace 
of any central authority remained to knit the tribes into a single 
nation, though the King of Ulster claimed supremacy over his 
fellow-kings of Munster, Leinster, and Connaught ; and even with- 
in these minor kingships the regal authority was little more than 
a name. The one living thing in the social and political chaos 
was the sept, or tribe, or clan, whose institutions remained those 
of the earliest stage of human civilization. Its chieftainship was 
hereditary, but, instead of passing from father to son, it was held 
by whoever was the eldest member of the ruling family at the 
time. The land belonging to the tribe was shared among its 
members, but redivided among them at certain intervals of years. 
The practice of " fosterage," or adoption, bound the adopted child 
more closely to its foster-parents than to its family by blood. 
Whatever elements of improvement or progress had been intro- 



440 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



duced into the island at an earlier time disappeared in the long 
and destructive struggle with the Danes. The coast-towns, such 
as Dublin or Waterford, which the invaders founded, remained 
Danish in blood and manners, and at feud with the Celtic tribes 
around them, though sometimes forced by the fortunes of war to 
pay tribute, and to accept, in name at least, the overlordship of the 
Irish kings. It was through these towns, however, that the inter- 
course with England, which had practically ceased since the eighth 
centurj"-, was to some extent renewed. Cut off from the native 
Church of the island by national antipathy, the Danish coast-cities 
applied to the see of Canterbury for the ordination of their bish- 
ops, and acknowledged a right of spiritual supervision in Lanfranc 
and Anselm. The relations thus formed were drawn closer by 
the slave-trade, which the Conqueror and Bishop Wulfstan suc- 
ceeded for a time in suppressing at Bristol, but which appears 
to have quickly revived. At the time of Henry the Second's ac- 
cession Ireland was full of Englishmen, who had been kidnaped 
and sold into slavery, in spite of royal prohibitions and the spirit- 
ual menaces of the English Church. The slave-trade afforded a 
legitimate pretext for war, had a pretext been needed by the am- 
bition of Henry the Second ; and within a few months of that 
king's coronation John of Salisbury was dispatched to obtain the 
Papal sanction for his invasion of the island. The enterprise, as it 
was laid before Pope Hadrian IV., took the color of a crusade. 
The isolation of Ireland from the general body of Christendom, 
the absence of learning and civilization, the scandalous vices of its 
people, were alleged as the grounds of Henry's action. It was the 
general belief at the time that all islands fell under the jurisdic* 
tion of the Papal See, and it was as a possession of the Roman 
Church that Henry sought Hadrian's permission to enter Ireland. 
His aim was " to enlarge the bounds of the Church, to restrain the 
progress of vices, to correct the manners of its people and to plant 
virtue among them, and to increase the Christian religion." He 
engaged to " subject the people to laws, to extirpate vicious cus- 
toms, to respect the rights of the native churches, and to enforce 
the payment of Peter's-pence" as a recognition of the overlordship 
of the Roman See. Hadrian by his bull approved the enterprise 
as one prompted by " the ardor of faith and love of religion," and 
declared his will that the people of Ireland should receive Henry 
with all honor, and revere him as their lord. The Papal bull Avas 
produced in a great council of the English baronage, but the op- 
position was strong enough to force on Henry a temporary aban- 
donment of his schemes, and his energies were diverted for the 
moment to plans of continental aggrandizement. 

Fourteen years had passed Avhen an Irish chieftain, Dermot, 
King of Leinster,' presented himself at Henry's Court, and did 
homage to him for the dominions from which he had been driven 
in one of the endless civil wars which distracted the island. Der- 
mot returned to Ireland with promises of aid from the English 
knighthood ; and was soon followed by Robert Fitz-Stephen, a son 
of the Constable of Cardigan, with a small band of a hundred and 



VII.] 



THE EEFOBMATION. 



441 



forty knights, sixty men at arms, and three or four hundred Welsh 
archers. Small as was the number of the adventurers, their horses 
and arms proved irresistible to the Irish kerns ; a sally of the 
men of Wexford was avenged by the storm of their town; the 
Ossory clans were defeated with a terrible slaughter, and Dermot, 
seizing a head from the heap of trophies Avhich his men had piled at 
his feet, tore off in savage triumph its nose and lips with his teeth. 
The arrival of fresh forces heralded the coming of Richard of 
Clare, Earl of Pembroke and Strigui],a ruined baron who bore the 
nickname of Strongbow, and who in defiance of Henry's prohibi- 
tion landed with a force of fifteen hundred men, as Dermot's mer- 
cenary, near Waterford. The city was at once stormed, and the 
united forces of the Earl and King marched to the siege of Dublin. 
In spite of a relief attempted by the King of Connaught, who was 
recognized as oyerking of the island by the rest of the tribes, Dub- 
lin was taken by surprise; and the marriage of Earl Richard with 
Eva, Dermot's daughter, left him on the death of his father-in-law, 
which followed quickly on these successes, master of his kingdom 
of Leinster. The new lord had soon, however, to hurry back to 
England, and appease the jealousy of Henry by the surrender of 
Dublin to the Crown, by doing homage for Leinster as an English 
lordship, and by accompanying the King in his voyage to the new 
dominion which the adventurers had won. Had Henry been al- 
lowed by fortune to carry out Jiis piirpose, the conquest of Ireland 
would now have been accomplished. The King of Connaught in- 
deed and the chiefs of Ulster refused him homage, but the rest of 
the Irish tribes owned his suzerainty; the bishops in synod at 
Cashel recognized him as their lord ; and he was preparing to pen- 
etrate to the north and west, and to secure his conquest by a sys- 
tematic erection of castles throughout the country, when the 
troubles which followed on the murder of Archbishop Thomas re- 
called him hurriedly to Normandy. The lost opportunity never 
again arrived. Connaught, indeed, bowed to a nominal acknowl- 
edgment of Henry's overlordship ; John De Courcy penetrated 
into Ulster and established himself at Downpatrick; and the King- 
planned for a while the establishment of his youngest son, John, as 
lord of Ireland. But the levity of the young prince, who mocked 
the rude dresses of the native chieftains, and plucked them in in- 
sult by the beard, compelled his recall ; and nothing but the feuds 
and weakness of the Irish tribes enabled the adventurers to hold 
the districts of Drogheda, Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, and Cork, 
which formed what was known as the " English Pale." 

Had the Irish driven their invaders into the sea, or tlie English 
succeeded in the complete conquest of Ireland, the misery of its 
after-history might have been avoided. A struggle such as that 
of Scotland under Bruce might have produced a spirit of patriot- 
ism and national union which would have formed a peo]:>le out of 
the mass of warring clans. A conquest such as that of England 
by the Normans would have spread at any rate the law, the order, 
the peace, and civilization of the conquering country over the 
length and breadth of the conquered. Unhappily Ireland, while 



442 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



powerless to effect its deliverance, was strong enougli to hold its 
assailants at bay. The country was broken into two halves, whose 
conflict has never ceased. The barbarism of the native tribes was 
only intensified by their hatred of the civilized intruders. The 
intruders themselves, penned up in the narrow limits of the Pale, 
fell rapidly to the level of the Irish barbarism. All lawlessness, 
the ferocity, the narrowness of feudalism, broke out unchecked in 
the horde of adventurers who held the land by their sword. It 
needed the stern vengeance of John, whose army stormed their 
strongholds, and drove the leading barons into exile, to preserve 
even their fealty to the English Crown. John divided the Pale 
into counties, and ordered the observance of the English law; but 
the departure of his army was the signal for a return of the an- 
archy which he had trampled underfoot. Every Irishman with- 
out the Pale was deemed an enemy and a robber, nor was his mur- 
der cognizable by the law. Half the subsistence of the barons 
was drawn from their forays across the border, and these forays 
Avere avenged by incursions of native marauders, which carried 
havoc to tlie walls of Dublin. The English settlers in the Pale it- 
self were harried and oppressed by enemy and protector alike; 
Avhile the feuds of baron with baron wasted their strength, and 
prevented any efiective combination against the Irish enemy. 
The landing of a Scotch force after Bannockburn with Edward 
Bruce at its head, and a general rising of the clans on its ap- 
pearance, drove indeed the barons to a momentary union ; and 
in the bloody field of Atheury their valor was proved by the 
slaughter of eleven thousand of their foes, and the almost. com- 
plete extinction of the great sept of the O'Connors. But Avith 
victory returned anarchy and degradation. The barons sank more 
and more into Irish chieftains ; the Fitz-Maurices, who became 
Earls of Desmond, and whose great territory in the South Avas 
erected into a county palatine, adopted the dress and mannei's of 
the natives around them; and the provisions of the Statute of Kil- 
kenny were fruitless to check the growth of this evil. The stat- 
ute forbade the adoption by any man of English blood of the Irish 
language, or name, or dress ; it enforced the use of English law, 
and made that of the native, or Brehon, laAv, which had crept into 
the Pale, an act of treason ; it made treasonable any marriage of 
the Englishry Avith persons of Irish blood, or any adoption of En- 
glish children by Irish foster-fathers. The anxiety Avith which the 
English Government watched the degradation Avhich its laAVS had 
failed to avert stirred it at last to a serious effort for the conquest 
and organization of the island. In one of the intervals of peace 
Avhich checkei'ed his stormy reign, Richard the Second landed Avith 
an army of overpowering strength, before the advance of Avhich 
into the interior all notion of resistance Avas quickly abandoned. 
Seventy-five chiefs of clans did him homage ; and the four over- 
kings of the island followed him to Dublin, and submitted to re- 
ceive the order of knighthood. The King devoted himself eager- 
ly to the work of forming an effective government by the enforce- 
ment of the laAvs, the removal of tyrannical oflScers, and the con- 



VIL] 



THE BEFOBMATION. 



443 



ciliation of the native tribes ; but the troubles in England soon 
interrupted his efforts, and all traces of his work vanished with 
the embarkation of his soldiers. 

With the renewal of the French wars, and the outburst of the 
Wars of the Roses, Ireland was again left to itself. The policy 
of Henry the Seventh threw power without stint into the hands 
of the nobles of the Pale. When the Earl of Desmond defied the 
authority of the Government, Henry made him Lord Deputy. "All 
Ireland can not rule this man," complained the Council. "Then 
shall he rule all Ireland," replied the King. In the opening of his 
successor's reign English influence reached its lowest point of de- 
pression. The great Norman lords of the South, the Butlers and 
Geraldines, the De la Peers and the Fitzpatricks, though subjects 
in name, were in fact defiant of royal authority. In manners and 
outer seeming they had sunk into mere natives ; their feuds were 
as incessant as those of the Irish sejDts ; and their despotism over 
the miserable inhabitants of the Pale combined the horrors of feudal 
oppression with those of Celtic anarchy. Crushed by taxation, by 
oppression, by misgovernment, plundered alike by Celtic maraud- 
ers and by the troops levied to disperse them, the wretched descend- 
ants of the first English settlers preferred even Irish misrule to En- 
glish " order," and the border of the Pale retreated steadily toward 
Dublin. The towns of the sea-board, sheltered by their walls and 
their municipal self-government, formed the only excej)tions to 
the general chaos; elsewhere throughout its dominions the En- 
glish Govei'nment, though still strong enough to break down any 
open revolt, was a mere phantom of rule. From the Celtic tribes 
without the Pale even the remnant of civilization and of native 
union which had lingered on to the time of Strongbow had van- 
ished away. The feuds of the Irish septs were as bitter as their 
hatred of the stranger; and the Government at Dublin found it 
easy to maintain a strife, which saved it the necessity of self-de- 
fense, among a people whose " nature is such that for money one 
shall have the son to war against his father, and the father against 
his child." During the first thirty years of the sixteenth century, 
the annals of the country which remained under native rule re- 
cord more than a hundred raids and battles between clans of the 
North alone. But the time was at last come for a vigorous attempt 
on the part of England to introduce order into this chaos of tur- 
bulence and misrule. To Henry the Eighth the policy which had 
been pursued by his father was utterly hateful. His purpose was 
to rule in Ireland as thoroughly and effectively as he ruled in En- 
gland, and during the latter half of his reign he bent his whole 
energies to accomplish this aim. From the first hours of his ac- 
cession, indeed, the Irish lords felt the heavier hand of a master; 
and the Geraldines, Avho had been suffered under the preceding 
reign to govern Ireland in the name of the Crown, were quick to 
discover that the Crown would no longer stoop to be their tool. 
They resolved to frighten England again into a conviction of its 
helplessness; and the rising of Lord Thomas Fitzgerald followed 
the usual fashion of Irish revolts. A murder of the Archbishop 



444 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of Dublin, a capture of the city, a repulse before its castle, a harry- 
ing of the Pale, ended in a sudden disappearance of the rebels 
among the bogs and forests of the, border on the advance of the 
English forces. It had been usual to meet such an onset as this 
by a raid of the same character, by a corresponding failure before 
the castle of the rebellious noble, and a retreat like his own, which 
served as a preliminary to negotiations and a compromise. Un- 
luckily for the Geraldines, Henry had resolved to take Ireland se- 
riously in hand, and he had Cromwell to execute his will. Skef- 
fington, the new Lord Deputy, brought with him a train of artil- 
lery, which worked a startling change in the political aspect of the 
island. The castles which had hitherto sheltered rebellion were 
battered into ruins. Maynooth, the impregnable stronghold from 
which the Geraldines threatened Dublin, and ruled the Pale at 
their will, was beaten down in a fortnight. So crushing and un- 
foreseen was the blow that resistance was at once at an end. ISTot 
only was the power of the great Norman house Avhich had towered 
over Ireland utterly broken, but only a single hoy was left to pre- 
serve its name. 

With the fall of the Geraldines Ireland felt itself in a master's 
grasp. " Irishmen," wrote one of the lord justices to Cromwell, 
"were never in such fear as now. The King's sessions are being- 
kept in five shires more than formerly." Not only were the En- 
glishmen of the Pale at Henry's feet, but the kerns of Wicklow 
and Wexford sent in their submission ; and for the first time in 
men's memory an English army appeared in Munster and reduced 
the South to obedience. The great castle of the O'Briens, which 
guarded the passage of the Shannon, was carried by assault, and 
its fall carried with it the submission of Clare, The capture of 
Athlone brought about the reduction of Connaught, and assured 
the loyalty of the great Norman house of the De Burghs or Bourkes, 
who had assumed an almost royal authority in the West. The re- 
sistance of the tribes of the North was broken in the victory of 
Bellahoe. In seven years, partly through the vigor of Skefting- 
ton's successor. Lord Leonard Grey, and still more through the 
resolute will of Henry and Cromwell, the power of the Crown, 
which had been limited to the walls of Dublin, was acknowledged 
over the length and breadth of Ireland. But submission was for 
from being all that Henry desii'ed. His aim was to civilize the 
people whom he had conquered — to rule not by force, but by 
law. But the only conception of law which the King or his 
ministers could frame was that of English law. The customary 
law which prevailed without the Pale, the i:;itive system of 
clan government and common tenui-e of land by the tribe, as well 
as the poetry and literature which threw their lustre over the Irish 
tongue, were either unknown to the English statesmen, or despised 
by them as barbarous. The one mode of civilizing Ireland and 
redresssing its chaotic misrule which presented itself to their 
minds, was that of destroying the whole Celtic tradition of the 
Irish people — that of " making Ireland English" in manners, in law, 
and in tongue. The Deputy, Parliament, judges, sheriffs, which 



VII.] 



THE BEFOEMATION. 



445 



already existed within the Pale, furnished a faint copy of English 
institutions ; and these, it was hoped, might be gradually extended 
over the whole island. The English language and mode of life 
would follow, it was believed, the English law. The one effectual 
way of bi'inging about such a change as this lay in a complete 
conquest of the island, and in its colonization by English settlers ; 
but from this course, pressed on him as it had been by his own 
lieutenants and. by the settlers of the Pale, even the iron will of 
Henry shrank. It was at once too bloody and too expensive. To 
win over the chiefs, to turn them by policy and a patient generosi- 
ty into English nobles, to use the traditional devotion of their tribal 
dependents as a means of diffusing the new civilization of their 
chiefs, to trust to time and steady government for the gradual 
reformation of the country, was a policy safer, cheaper, more hu- 
mane, and more statesman-like. It was this system which, even 
before the fall of the Geraldines, Henry had resolved to adopt ; 
and it was this which he pressed on Ireland when the conquest had 
laid it at his feet. The chiefs were to be persuaded of the advan- 
tage of justice and legal rule. Their fear of any purpose to " ex- 
pel them from their lands and dominions lawfully possessed" was 
to be dispelled by a promise "to conserve them as their own." 
Even tlieir remonstrances against the introduction of English law 
were to be regarded, and the course of justice to be enforced or 
mitigated according to the circumstances of the country. In the 
resumption of lands or rights which clearly belonged to the Crown 
" sober ways, politic shifts, and amiable persuasions" were to be 
preferred to rigorous dealing. It was this system of conciliation 
which was in the main carried out by the English Government 
under Henry and his two successors. Chieftain after chieftain was 
won over to the acceptance of the indenture which guaranteed 
him in the possession of his lands, and left his authority over his 
tribesmen untouched, on conditions of a pledge of loyalty, of ab- 
stinence from illegal wars and exactions on his fellow-subjects, and 
of rendering a fixed tribute and service in war-time to the Crown. 
The sole test of loyalty demanded was the acceptance of an En- 
glish title, and the education of a son at the English Court; though 
in some cases, like that of the O'lSTeills, a promise was exacted to 
use the English language and dress, and to encourage tillage and 
husbandry. Compliance with conditions such as these was pro- 
cured, not merely by the terror of the royal name, but by heavy 
bribes. The chieftains in fact profited greatly by the change. 
Not only were the lands of the suppressed abbeys granted to them 
on their assumption of their new titles, but the English law-courts, 
ignoring the Irish custom by which the land belonged to the tribe 
at large, regarded the chiefs as sole proprietors of the soil. 

The assumption by Henry of the title of King of Ireland, in the 
place of the older title of Lord, which followed naturally on his 
quarrel with the Papacy, was the fitting crown of the new system. 
The merits of the system were unquestionable; its faults were 
such as a statesman of that day could hardly be expected to per- 
ceive. The prohibition of the national dress, customs, laws, and 



446 



HISTOEY OF THE ENaLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



language must have seemed to the Tudor politicians merely the 
suppression of a barbarism which stood in the Avay of all improve- 
ment ; and the error of their attempt could only be felt, if felt at 
all, in the districts without the Pale. Their firm and conciliatory 
policy must in the end have won, but for the fatal blunder which 
plunged Ireland into religious strife at the moment when her civil 
strife seemed about to come to an end. Ever since Strongbow's 
landing there had been no one Irish Church, simply because there 
had been no one Irish nation. There was not the slightest differ- 
ence in doctrine or discipline between the Church without the 
Pale and the Church within it. But within the Pale the clergy 
were exclusively of English blood and speech, and Avithout it they 
were exclusively of Irish. Irishmen were shut out by law from 
abbeys and churches within the English boundary; and the ill- 
will of the natives shut out Englishmen from churches and ab- 
beys outside it. As to the religious state of the country, it Avas 
much on a level with its political condition. Feuds and misrule 
had told fatally on ecclesiastical discipline. The bishops Avere 
political officers, or hard fighters like the chiefs around them ; 
their sees Avere neglected, their cathedrals abandoned to decay. 
Through Avhole dioceses the churches lay in ruins and without 
priests. The only preaching done in the country Avas done by the 
begging friars, and in Ireland the number of friars' houses was 
fcAV. "If the King do not provide a remedy," it was said in 1525, 
"there will be no more Christentie than in ,the middle of Turkey." 
Unfortunately the remedy Avhich Henry provided Avas Avorse than 
the disease. Politically Ireland Avas one Avith England, and the 
great revolution Avhich Avas severing the one country from the , 
Papacy extended itself naturally to the other. The results of it 
indeed at first seemed small enough. The Supremacy, a question 
which had convulsed England, passed over into Ireland to meet 
its only obstacle in a general indifference. Every body Avas ready 
to accept it without a thought of its consequences. The bishops 
and clergy within the Pale bent to the King's will as easily as their 
felloAVS in England, and their example Avas folloAved by at least 
four prelates of dioceses without tlie Pale, The native chieftains 
made no more scruple than the Lords of the Council in renouncing 
obedience to the Bishop of Pome, and in acknoAvledging Henry as 
the " Supreme Head of the Church of England and Ireland under 
Christ," There was none of the resistance to the dissolution of 
the abbeys Avhich had been witnessed on the other side of the 
Channel, and the greedy chieftains shoAved themselves perfectly 
Avilling to share the plunder of the Church. But the results of the 
measure Avere fatal to the little culture and religion which even 
the past centuries of disorder had spared. Such as they Avere, the 
religious houses Avere the only schools Avhich Ireland contained. 
The system of vicars, so general in England, Avas rare in Ireland ; 
churches in the patronage of the abbeys Avere for the most part 
served by the religious themselves, and the dissolution of their 
houses suspended public Avorship over large districts of the coun- 
try. The friars, hitherto the only preachers, and who continued 



VII.] 



THE BEFOBMATION. 



4-47 



to labor and teach in spite of the efforts of the Government, were 
thrown necessarily into a position of antagonism to the English 
rule. 

Had the ecclesiastical changes which were forced on the country 
ended here, however, little harm would in the end have been done. 
But in England the breach with Rome, the destruction of the mo- 
nastic orders, and the establishment of the Supremacy, had roused 
in the people itself a desire for theological change which Henry, 
liowever grudgingly, had little by little to satisfy. In Ireland the 
spirit of the Reformation never existed among the people at all. 
They accepted the legislative measures passed in the English Par- 
liament without any dream of theological consequences, or of any 
change in the doctrine or ceremonies of the Church, N"ot a single 
voice demanded the abolition of pilgrimages, or the destruction of 
images, or the reform of public worship. The mission of Archbish- 
op Browne " for- the plucking-down of idols and extinguishing of 
idolatry" was the first step in the long efibrt of the English Gov- 
ernment to force a new faith on a people who to a man clung pas- 
sionately to their old religion. Browne's attempts at "tuning 
the pulpits" were met by a sullen and significant opposition, 
" Neither by gentle exhortation," the Primate wrote to Cromwell, 
" nor by evangelical instruction, neither by oath of them solemnly 
taken, nor yet by threats of sharp correction, may I persuade or in- 
duce any, whether religious or secular, since my coming over, once 
to preach the Word of God nor the just title of our illustrious 
Prince." Even the acceptance of the Supremacy, which had been 
so quietly eff"ected, was brought into question when its results be- 
came clear. The bishops abstained from compliance with the or- 
der to erase the Pope's name out of their mass-books. The pulpits 
remained steadily silent. When Browne ordered the destruction 
of the images and relics in his owp cathedral, he had to report 
that the prior and canons " find them so sweet for their gain thnt 
they heed not my words," Cromwell, however, was resolute for 
a religious uniformity between the two islands, and the Primate 
borrowed some of his patron's vigor. Recalcitrant priests were 
thrown into prison, images were plucked down from the roodloft, 
and the most venerable of Irish relics, the staif of St. Patrick, was 
burned in the market-place. But he found no support in his vig- 
or, save from across the Channeh The Irish Council was cold. 
The Lord Deputy knelt to say prayers before the Rood at Tuan. 
A sullen, dogged opposition baffled his efforts, till the triumph of 
the old Catholic party at the close of Henry's reign forced him to 
a brief repose. With the accession of Edward the Sixth, however, 
the system of change was renewed Avith all the energy of Protest- 
ant zeal. The bishops were summoned before the Deputy, Sir 
Anthony St. Leger, to receive the new English Liturgy, which, 
though written in a tongue as strange to the native Irish as Latin 
itself, was now to supersede the Latin service-book in every dio- 
cese. The order was the signal for an open strife. " Now shall 
every illiterate fellow read mass," burst forth Dowding, the Arch- 
bishop of Armagh, as he flung out of the chamber with all but one 



448 



HISTORY OF TSE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of bis suffragans at Ins heels. Browne, on the other hand, was fol- 
lowed in his profession of obedience by the Bishops of Meath, 
Limerick, and Kildare. The Government, however, was far from 
quailing before the division of the episcopate. Dowding was 
driven from the country, and the vacant sees were filled with Prot- 
estants like Bale, of the most advanced type. But no change 
could be wrought by measures such as these on the opinions of the 
people themselves. The new episcopal reformers spoke no Irish, 
and of their English sermons not a word was understood by the 
rude kerns around the pulpit. The native priests remained si- 
lent. "As for preaching we have none," reports a zealous Protest- 
ant, " without which the ignorant can have no knowledge." The 
prelates who used the new prayer-book were simply regarded as 
heretics. The Bishop of Meath was assured by one of his flock 
that, " if the country wist how, they would eat you." Protestant- 
ism had failed to wrest a single Irishman from his older convic- 
tions, but it succeeded in uniting all Ireland against the Crown. 
The old political distinctions which had been produced by the con- 
quest of Strongbow faded before the new struggle for a common 
faith. The population within the Pale and without it became one, 
"not as the Irish nation," it has been acutely said, "but as Catho- 
lics." A new sense of national identity was found in the identity 
of religion. "Both English and Irish begin to oiDpose your Lord- 
ship's orders," wrote Browne to Cromwell, "and to lay aside their 
national old quarrels." 

With the accession of Mary the shadowy form of this earlier 
Irish Protestantism melted quietly away. There were no Protest- 
ants in Ireland save the new bishops; and when Bale had fled^ 
over the sea, and his fellow-prelates had been deprived, the Church 
resumed its old appearance. No attempt, indeed, was made to 
restore the monasteries ; and Mary exercised her supremacy, de- 
posed and appointed bishops, and repudiated Papal interference 
with her ecclesiastical acts, as vigorously as her father. But the 
mass was restored, the old modes of religious worship were again 
held in honor, and religious dissension between the Government 
and its Irish subjects was for the time at an end. With the close, 
however, of one danger came the rise of another. England was 
growing tired of the policy of conciliation which had been stead- 
ily pursued by Henry the Eighth and his successor. As yet it 
had been rewarded with precisely the sort of success which Wol- 
sey had anticipated : the chiefs had come quietly in to the plan, 
and their septs had followed them in submission to the new order. 
" The winning of the Earl of Desmond was the winning of the 
rest of Munster with small charges. The making O'Brien an earl 
made all that county obedient." The Macwilliam became Lord 
Clanrickard, and the Fitzpatricks barons of Upper Ossory. The 
visit of the great IsTorthern chief, who had accepted the title of 
Earl of Tyrone, to the English Court was regarded as a marlJed 
step in the process of civilization. In the South, where the sys- 
tem of English law was slowly spreading, the chieftains sat on the 
bench side by side with the English justices of the peace; and 



YIL] 



TEE BEFORMATIOX. 



449 



something had been done to check the feuds and disorder of the 
Avild tribes between Limerick and Tipperary. "Men may pass qui- 
etly throughout these counties without danger of robbery or oth- 
er displeasure." In the Clanrickard county, once wasted with war, 
" plowing increaseth daily." In Tyrone and the North, indeed, 
tlie old disorder i-eigned without a check; and everywhere the 
process of imi)rovement tried the temper of the English deputies 
by the slowness of its advance. The only hope of any real prog- 
ress lay in patience ; and there were signs that the Government 
at Dublin found it hard to wait. The " rough handling" of the 
chiefs by Sir Edward Bellinghara, the Lord Deputy of the Pro- 
tector Somerset, roused a spirit of revolt that only subsided when 
the poverty of the Exchequer forced him to withdraw the gar- 
risons he had planted in the heart of the country. Lord Sussex 
made raid after raid to no purpose on the obstinate tribes of the 
North, burning in one the Cathedral of Armagh and three other 
churches, A far more serious breach in the system of concilia- 
tion was made when the project of English colonization which 
Henry had steadily rejected was adopted by the same Lord 
Deputy. The country of the O'Connors, which was assigned to 
English settlers, was made shire-land under the names of King's 
and Queen's County, in honor of Philip and Mary; and a sav- 
age warfare began at once between the planters and the dis- 
possessed septs, which only ended in the following reign in the 
extermination of the Irishmen. Commissioners were appointed 
to survey waste lands, with the aim of carrying the work of 
colonization into other districts, when the accession of Elizabeth 
and the caution of Cecil checked further efforts in this direction, 
and resumed the safer though more tedious policy of Henry the 
Eighth. 

The alarm, however, at English aggression had already spread 
among the natives ; and its result was seen in a revolt of the 
North, and in the rise of a leader far more vigorous and able than 
any Avith Avhom the Government had had as yet to contend. The 
acceptance of the Earldom of Tyrone by the chief of the O'Neills 
brought about the inevitable conflict between the system of suc- 
cession recognized by English and that recognized by Irish law. 
On the death of the Earl, England acknowledged his eldest son 
as the heir of his earldom; Avhile the sept maintained their older 
right of choosing a chief from among the members of the family, 
and preferred a younger son of less doubtful legitimacy, Sussex 
marched northward to settle the question by force of arms; but 
ere he could reach Ulster the activity of Shane O'Neill had quell- 
ed tlie disaffection of his rivals, the O'Donnells of Donegal, and 
won over the Scots of Antrim, "Never before," wrote Sussex, 
"durst Scot or Irishman look Englishman in the face in plain or 
wood since I came here;" but Shane had fired his men Avith a new 
courage, and charging the Deputy's array Avith a force hardly half 
its number, drove it back in rout on Armagh. A promise of par- 
don induced him to visit London, and make an illusory submission, 

29 



450 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



but he was no sooner safe home again than its terms were set 
aside; and after a wearisome struggle, in which Shane foiled the 
efforts of the Lord Deputy to entrap or to poison him, he remain- 
ed virtually master of the North. His success stirred larger dreams 
of ambition ; he invaded Connaught, and pressed Clanrickard hard, 
while he replied to the remonstrances of the Council at Dublin 
with a Avild defiance. "By the sword I have won these lands," he 
answered, " and by the sword will I keep them." But defiance 
broke idly against the skill and vigor of Sir Henry Sidne}^, who 
succeeded Sussex as Lord Deputy. The rival septs of the North 
were drawn into a rising against O'Neill, while the English army 
advanced from the Pale ; and Shane, defeated by the O'Donnells, 
took refuge in Antrim, and was hewed to pieces in a drunken 
squabble by his Scottish entertainers. The victory of Sidney 
won ten years of peace for the wretched country ; but Ireland 
had already been fixed on by the Catholic powers of the Conti- 
nent as the ground on wliich they could with most advantage 
fight out their quarrel with Elizabeth. Practically indeed the re- 
ligious question hardly existed there. The religious policy of the 
Protectorate had indeed been resumed on the Queen's accession ; 
Rome was again renounced, the new Act of Uniformity forced the 
English prayer-book on the island, and compelled attendance at 
the services in which it was used. There was, as before, a general 
air of compliance with the law; even in the districts without the 
Pale the bishops generally conformed, and the only exceptions of 
Avhich we have any information wei'e to be found in the extreme 
South and in the North, where resistance w\as distant enough to be 
safe. But the real cause of this apparent submission to the act 
lay in the fact that it remained, and necessarily remained, a dead 
letter. It was impossible to find any considerable number of En- 
glish ministers, or of Irish priests acquainted with English. Meath 
was one of the most civilized dioceses, and out of a hundred cu- 
rates in it hardly ten knew any tongue save their own. The 
promise that the service-book should be translated into Irish Avas 
never fulfilled, and the final clause of the act itself authorized the 
use of a Latin rendering of it till further order could be taken. 
But this, like its other provisions, was ignored, and throughout 
Elizabeth's reign the gentry of the Pale went unquestioned to 
mass. There was in fact no religious persecution, and in the 
many complaints of Shane O'Neill vre find no mention of a re- 
ligious grievance. But this was far from being the view of Rome 
or of Spain, of the Jesuit missionaries, or of the Irish exiles abroad. 
They represented, and perhaps believed, the Irish people to be 
writhing under a religious oppression which they were burning to 
shake off. They saw in the Irish loyalty to Catholicism a lever 
for overtlirowing the great heretic Queen. Stukely, an Irish ref- 
ugee, pressed on the Pope and Spain the policy of a descent on 
Ireland ; and his pressure brought about at last the landing of a 
small Spanish force on the shores of Kerry. In spite, however, of 
the arrival of a Papal legate with the blessing of the Holy See, 



VII.] 



THE BEFOEMATIOX. 



451 



the attempt ended in a miserable failure. The fort of Smerwick, 
in which the invaders had intrenched themselves, was forced to sur- 
render, and its garrison put ruthlessly to the sword. The Earl of 
Desmond, who after long indecision rose to support them, was de- 
feated and hunted over his own country, which the panic-born 
cruelty of his pursuers harried into a wilderness. Pitiless as it 
was, the work done in Monster spread a terror over the land 
which served England in good stead when the struggle with 
Catholicism culminated in the fight with the Armada; and not a 
chieftain stirred during that memorable year save to massacre the 
miserable men who Avere shipwrecked along the coast of Bantry 
or Sligo. 

The power of the Government was from this moment recognized 
every where throughout the land. But it was a power founded 
solely on terror ; and the outrages and exactions of the soldiery, 
who had been flushed with rapine and bloodshed in the South, 
sowed during the years which followed its reduction the seeds of 
a revolt more formidable than any which Elizabeth had yet en- 
countered. The tribes of Ulster, divided by the policy of Sidney, 
were again united by the common hatred of their oppressors ; and 
in Hugh O'JSTeill tliey found a leader of even greater ability than 
Shane himself. Hugh had been brought up at the English Court, 
and was in manners and bearing an Englishman ; he had been re- 
warded for his steady loyalty in previous contests by a grant of 
the Earldom of Tyrone, and had secured aid fi-ora the Government, 
in his contest with a rival chieftain of his clan, by an offer to in- 
troduce the English laws and shire-system into his new country. 
But he was no sooner undisputed master of the North than his 
tune gradually changed. Whether from a long-formed plan, or 
from suspicion of English designs upon himself, he at last took a 
position of open defiance. It was at the moment when the Treaty 
of Vervins, and the wreck of the second Armada, freed Elizabeth's 
hands from the struggle with Spain, that the revolt of the great 
Northern tribe of the O'Neill broke the quiet which had prevailed 
since the victories of Lord Grey, and forced the Irish question 
again on the Queen's attention. The tide of her recent triumphs 
seemed at first to have turned. A defeat of the English forces in 
Tyrone brought a general rising of the Northern tribes ; and a 
great effort made in the following year for the suppression of the 
growing revolt failed through the vanity and disobedience of the 
Queen's Lieutenant, the young Earl of Essex, a favorite who rec- 
ompensed her indulgence on his recall by a puerile sedition 
which brought him to the block. His successor, Lord Mountjoy, 
found himself master on his arrival of only a few miles round 
Dublin ; but in three years the revolt was at an end. A Spanish 
force which landed to support it at Kinsale was driven to sur- 
render; a line of forts secured the country as the English master- 
ed it ; all open opposition Avas crushed out by the energy and the 
ruthlessness of the new lieutenant; and a famine which followed 
on his ravages completed the devastating work of the sword. 



452 



SIS TOBY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Hugh O'Neill was brought in triumph to Dublin ; the Earl of Des- 
mond, who had again roused Munster into revolt, fled for refuge 
to Spain ; and the work of conquest was at last brought to a close. 
Under the administration of Mountjoy's successor, Sir Arthur 
Chichester, an able and determined effort was made for the settle- 
ment of the conquered province by the general introduction of a 
purely English system of government, justice, and property. Ev- 
ery vestige of the old Celtic constitution of the country was re- 
jected as " barbarous," The tribal authority of the chiefs was 
taken from them by law. They were reduced to the position of 
great nobles and land-owners, while their tribesmen rose from sub- 
jects into tenants, owing only fixed and customary dues and serv- 
ices to their lords. The tribal system of property in common was 
set aside, and the communal holdings of the tribesmen turned into 
the copy-holds of English law. In the same way the chieftains 
were stripped of their hereditary jurisdiction, and the English sys- 
tem of judges and trial by jury substituted for their proceedings 
under Brehon or customary law. To all this the Celts opposed 
the tenacious obstinacy of their race. Irish juries, then as now, 
refused to convict. Glad as the tribesmen were to be freed from 
the arbitrary exactions of their chiefs, they held them for chief- 
tains still. The attempt made by Chichester, under pressure from 
England, to introduce the English uniformity of religion ended in 
utter failure ; for the Englishry of the Pale remained as Catholic 
as the native Irishry; and the sole result of the measure was to 
build up a new Irish people out of both on the common basis of 
religion. Much, however, had been done by the firm yet moderate 
government of the Lieutenant, and signs were already a])pearing 
of a disposition on the part of the people to conform gradually to 
the new usages, when the English Council under Elizabeth's suc- 
cessor suddenly resolved upon and carried through the great rev- 
olutionary measure which is known as the Colonization of Ulster. 
The pacific and conservative policy of Chichester was abandoned 
for a vast policy of spoliation ; two-thirds of the North of Ireland 
were declared to have been confiscated to the Ci-own by the part 
its possessors had taken in a recent effort at revolt; and the lands 
which were thus gained were allotted to new settlers of Scotch 
and English extraction. In its material results the Plantation of 
Ulster was undoubtedly a brilliant success. Farms and home- 
steads, churches and mills, rose fast amid the desolate wilds of 
Tyrone. The Corporation of London undertook the colonization 
of Derry, and gave to the little town the name which its heroic 
defense has made so famous. The foundations of the economic 
prosperity which has raised Ulster high above the rest of Ireland 
in wealth and intelligence were undoubtedly laid in the confisca- 
tion of 1610 : nor did the measure meet with any opposition at the 
time save that of secret discontent. Tlie evicted natives with- 
drew sullenly to the lands which had been left them by the spoil- 
er; but all faith in English justice had been torn from the minds 
of the Irishry, and the seed had been sown of that fatal harvest 



VII.] 



TRE REFORMATION. 



453 



of distrust and disaffection which was to be reaped through tyr- 
anny and massacre in the age to come. 

The colonization of Ulster has carried ns beyond the limits of 
our present story. The triumph of Mountjoy flung its lustre over 
the last days of Elizabeth, but no outer triumph could break the 
gloom which gathered round the dying Queen. Lonely as she 
had always been, her loneliness deepened as she drew toward the 
grave. The statesmen and warriors of her earlier days had drop- 
ped one by one from her Council-board ; and their successors were 
watching her last moments, and intriguing for favor in the coming 
reign. The old splendor of her Court Avaned and disappeared. 
Only officials remained about her, " the other of the Council and 
nobility estrange themselves by all occasions." As she passed 
along in her progi'esses, the people whose applause she courted 
remained cold and silent. The temper of the age, in fact, was 
changing, and isolating her as it changed. Her own England, the 
England which had grown up around her, serious, moral, pi'osaic, 
shrank coldly from this child of earth and the Renascence, brill- 
iant, fanciful, unscrupulous, irreligious. She had enjoyed life as 
the men of her day enjoyed it, and, now that they were gone, she 
clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She hunted, she danced, she 
jested with her young favorites, she coquetted and scolded and 
frolicked at sixty-seven as she had done at thirty. " The Queen," 
wrote a courtier a few months before her death, "was never so 
gallant these many years, nor so set upon jollity." She persisted, 
in spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses from country- 
house to country-house. She clung to business as of old, and rated 
in her usual fashion " one who minded not to giving up some mat- 
ter of account." But death crept on. Her face became haggard, 
and her frame shrank almost to a skeleton. At last her taste for 
finery disappeared, and she refused to change her dresses for a 
week together. A strange melancholy settled down on her; "she 
held in her hand," says one who saw her in her last days, " a gold- 
en cup, which she often put to her lips ; but in truth her heart 
seemed too full to need more filling." Gradually her mind gave 
way. She lost her memory, the violence of her temper became 
unbearable, her very courage seemed to forsake her. She called 
for a sword to lie constantly beside her, and thi'ust it from time 
to time through the arras, as if she heard murderers stirring there. 
Food and rest became alike distasteful. She sat day and night 
projDped up with pillows on a stool, her finger on her lip, her eyes 
fixed on the floor, without a word. If she once broke the silence, 
it was with a flash of her old queenliness. Cecil asserted that 
she " must" go to bed, and the word roused her like a trumpet. 
"Must!" she exclaimed; "is must a word to be addressed to 
princes? Little man, little man ! thy father, if he had been alive, 
durst not have used that word." Then, as her anger spent itself, 
she sank into her old dejection. " Thou art so presumptuous," 
she said, "because thou knowest I shall die." She rallied once 
more when the ministers beside her bed named Lord Beaucharap, 



454 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. Vni. 
Tub 

'o-NQtJBBT OF 

Ikeland. 
1588- 
1610. 



the heir to the Suffolk claim, as a possible successor. " I will have 
no rogue's son," she cried hoarsely, "in my seat." But she gave 
no sign, save a motion of the head, at the mention of the King of 
Scots, She was in fact fast becoming insensible; and early the 
next morning the life of Elizabeth, a life so great, so strange and 
lonely in its greatness, passed quietly away. 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



455 



CHAPTER VIII. 

PURITAN ENGLAND. 

Section I.— Tlie Puritans. 1583—1603. 

\_Authorities.— For the primary facts of the ecclesiastical history of this time, 
Strype's "Annals," and his lives of Grindal and Whitgift. Neal's "History of 
the Puritans," besides its inaccuracies, contains little for this period which is not 
taken from the more colorless Strype. For the origin of the Presbyterian move- 
ment, see the "Discourse of the Troubles at Frankfort, 1576," often republished; 
for its later contest with Elizabeth, Mr. Maskell's "Martin Marprelate," which gives 
copious extracts from the rare pamphlets printed under that name. Mr. Hallam's 
account of the whole struggle ("Constitutional History," caps. iv. andvii.) is ad- 
mirable for its fullness, lucidity, and impartiality. Wallington's "Diary " gives us 
the common Hfe of Puritanism ; its higher side is shown in Mrs. Hutchinson's Me- 
moirs of her Husband, and in the early life of Milton, as told in Mr. Masson's biog- 
raphy.] ^ 

No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed 
over England during the j^ears which parted the middle of the 
reign of Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. En- 
gland became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible. 
It Avas as yet the one English book vi^hich was familiar to every 
Englishman ; it was read at churches and read at home, and every 
where its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not dead- 
ened to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm. 
When Bishop Bonner set up the first six Bibles in St. Paul's, 
"many well-disposed people used much to resort to the hearing 
thereof, especially when they could get any that had an audible 
voice to read to them. . . . One John Porter used sometimes to be 
occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of himself as well 
as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a big stature ; 
and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him, because he 
could read well and had an audible voice." The poj)ularity of the 
Bible was owing to other causes besides that of religion. The 
whole prose literature of England, save the forgotten tracts of 
Wyclif, has grown up since the translation of the Scriptures by 
Tyndall and Coverdale. No history, no romance, no poetry, save 
the little-known verse of Chaucer, existed for any practical pur- 
pose in the English tongue when the Bible was ordered to be set 
up in churches. Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the crowds 
that gathered around Bonner's Bibles in the nave of St. Paul's, or 
the family group that hung on the Avords of the Geneva Bible in 
the devotional exercises at home, were leavened Avith a new litera- 
ture. Legends and .annals, Avar song and psalm, State-rolls and 
biographies, the mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evan- 
gelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among 



456 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the heathen, philosophic argnments, apocalyptic visions, all were 
flung broadcast over minds iinoccupied for the most part by any 
rival learning. The disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had 
wrought the revolution of the Renascence. Tlie disclosure of the 
older mass of Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the 
Reformation. But the one revolution was far deeper and wider in 
its effects than the other. No version could transfer to another 
tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave their value to 
the authors of Greece and Rome. Classical letters, therefore, re- 
mained in the possession of the learned — that is, of the few; and 
among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the ped- 
ants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Floren- 
tine Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual But 
the tongue of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenic Greek, lent 
themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. 
As a mere literary monument, the English vei'sion of the Bible re- 
mains the noblest example of the English tongue. Its perpetual 
use made it from tlie instant of its appearance the standard of our 
language. But for the moment its literary effect was less than its 
social. The power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed 
itself in a thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspicuous- 
ly than in the influence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, 
we must repeat, the whole literature which was practically accessi- 
ble to ordinary Englishmen; and when we recall the number of 
common phrases which we owe to great authors, the bits of Shak- 
spere, or Milton, or Dickens, or Thackeray, which unconsciously in- 
terweave themselves in our ordinary talk, we shall better under- 
stand the strange mosaic of Biblical words and phrases which col- 
ored English talk two hundred years ago. The mass of picturesque 
allusion and illustration which avc borrow from a thousand books, 
our fathers were forced to borrow from one; and the borrowing 
was the easier and the more natural that the range of the Hebrew 
literature fitted it for the expression of every phase of feeling. 
When Spenser poured forth his warmest love-notes in the "Epi- 
thalamion," he adopted the very words of the Psalmist, as he bade 
the gates open for the entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw 
the mists break over the hills of Dunbar, he hailed the sun-burst 
with the cry of David : " Let God arise, and let his enemies be 
scattered. Like as the sun riseth, so shalt thou drive them away !" 
Even to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery 
in prophet and apocalypse gave a loftiness and ardor of expression, 
that with all its |;endency to exaggeration and bombast we may 
prefer to the slipshod vulgarisms of the shopkeej)er of to-daj^. 

But far greater than its effect on literature or social plirase 
was the effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large. 
Elizabeth might silence or tune the pulpits ; but it was impossible 
for her to silence or tune the great preachers of justice, and mercy, 
and truth, who spoke from the book which she had again opened 
for her people. The whole moral effect which is produced nowa- 
days by the religious newspaper, the tract, the essay, the lecture, 
the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced by the Bible 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



457 



alone. And its effect in this way, however dispassionately we ex- 
amine it, was simply amazing. The whole temper of the nation was 
chano-ed. A new conception of life and of man superseded the 
old. A new moral and religious impulse spread through every 
class. Literature reflected the general tendency of the time ; and 
the dumpy little quartos of controversy and piety, which still crowd 
our older libraries, drove before them the classical translations and 
Italian novelettes of the age of Elizabeth. " Theology rules there," 
said Grotius of England, only ten years after the Queen's death ; 
and when Casaubon, the last of the great scholars of the sixteenth 
century, was invited to England by King James, he found both 
King and people indifferent to letters. "There is a great abun- 
dance of theologians in England," he says to a friend ; " all point 
their studies in that direction." The study of the country gentle- 
man pointed toward theology as much as that of the scholar. As 
soon as Colonel' Hutchinson " had improved his natural understand- 
ing with the acquisition of learning, the first studies he exercised 
himself in were the principles of religion." The whole nation be- 
came, in fact, a Church. The great problems of life and death, 
whose "obstinate questionings" found no answer in the higher 
minds of Shakspere's day, pressed for an answer from the men who 
followed him. "We must not, indeed, picture the early Puritan as 
a gloomy fanatic. It was long before the religious movement — 
which affected the noble and the squire as much as the shopkeeper 
or the farmer — came into conflict with general culture. With the 
close of the Elizabethan age, indeed, the intellectual freedom which 
had marked it faded insensibly away: the bold philosophical spec- 
ulations which Sydney had caught from Bruno, and which had 
brought on Marlowe and Kaleigh the charge of atheism, died, like 
her own religious indifference, with the Queen. But the lighter and 
more elegant sides of the Elizabethan culture harmonized well 
enough with the temper of the Puritan gentleman. The figure 
of Colonel Hutchinson, one of the Regicides, stands out from his 
wife's canvas with the grace and tenderness of a portrait by Yan- 
dyck. She dwells on the personal beauty which distinguished his 
youth, on " his teeth even and white as the purest ivory," " his 
hair of brown, very thickset in his youth, softer than the finest silk, 
curling with loose great rings at the ends." Serious as was his 
temper in graver matters, the young squire was fond of hawking, 
and piqued himself on his skill in dancing and fence. His artistic 
taste showed itself in a critical love of "gravings, sculpture, and 
all liberal arts," as well as in the pleasure he took in his gardens, 
" in the improvement of his grounds, in j)lanting groves and walks 
and fruit-trees." If he was " diligent in his examination of the 
Scriptures," "he had a great love for music, and often diverted 
himself with a viol, on which he played masterly." A taste for 
music, indeed, seems to have been common in the graver homes of 
the time. If we pass from Owthorpe and Colonel Hutchinson to 
the house of a London scrivener in Bread Street, we find Milton's 
father, precisian and man of business as he was, composing madri- 
gals to Oriana, and rivalinc: Bird and Gibbons as a writer of sa- 



458 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



cred song. "We miss, indeed, the passion of the Elizabethan time, 
its caprice, its largeness of feeling and sympathy, its quick pulse 
of delight ; but, on the other hand, life gains in moral grandeur, 
in a sense of the dignity of manhood, in orderliness and equable 
force. The temper of the Puritan gentleman was just, noble, and 
self-controlled. The larger geniality of the age that had passed 
away shrank into an intense tenderness within the narrower circle 
of the home. " He was as kind a father," says Mrs. Hutchinson 
of her husband, "as dear a brother, as good a master, as faithful a 
friend as the Avorld had." Passion was replaced by a manly puri- 
ty. "Neither in youth nor riper years could the most fair or en- 
ticing woman ever draw him so much as into unnecessary familiar- 
ity or dalliance. Wise and virtuous women he loved, and delighted 
in all pure and holy and unblamable conversation with them, but 
so as never to excite scandal or temptation. Scurrilous discourse 
even among men he abhorred ; and though he sometimes took 
pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that which was mixed with im- 
purity he never could endure." The play and willfulness of life, 
in which the Elizabethans found its chiefest charm, the Puritan re- 
garded as unworthy of its character and end. His aim was to at- 
tain self-command, to be master of himself, of his thought and 
speech and acts. A certain gravity and reflectiveness gave its 
tone to the lightest details of his daily converse Avith the world 
about him. His temper, quick as it might naturally be, Avas kept 
under strict control. In his discourse he was ever on his guard 
against talkativeness or frivolity, striving to be deliberate in speech 
and " ranking the words beforehand." His life was orderly and 
methodical, sparing of diet and of self-indulgence; he rose early, 
"he never was- at any time idle, and hated to see any one else so." 
The new sobriety and self-restraint marked itself even in his change 
of dress. The gorgeous colors and jewels of the Renascence dis- 
appeared. Colonel Hutchinson "left ofi" veiy early the wearing 
of any thing that was costly, yet in his plainest negligent habit 
appeared very much a gentleman." The loss of color and variety 
in costume reflected no doubt a certain loss of color and variety 
in life itself; but it was a loss compensated bj'- solid gains. Great- 
est among these, perhaps, was the new conception of social equality. 
Their common call, their common brothei'hood in Christ, annihilated 
in the mind of the Puritans that overpowering sense of social dis- 
tinctions which characterized the age of Elizabeth. The meanest 
peasant felt himself ennobled as a child of God. The proudest 
noble recognized a spiritual equality in the poorest "saint." The 
great social revolution of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate was 
already felt in the demeanor of gentlemen like Hutchinson. "He 
had a loving and sweet courtesy to the poorest, and would often 
employ many spare hours with the commonest soldiers and poor- 
est laborers." " He never disdained the meanest nor flattered the 
greatest." But it Avas felt even more in the ncAv dignity and self- 
respect with which the consciousness of their "calling" invested 
the classes beneath the rank of the gentry. Take such a portrait 
as that which John Wallington, a turner in Eastcheap, has left us 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



459 



of a London housewife, his mother. " She was very loving," he 
says, " and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to lier hus- 
band, very tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were 
godly, much misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pat- 
tern of sobriety unto many, very seldom was seen abroad except 
at church ; when others recreated themselves at holidays and other 
times, she would take her needle-work, and say ' here is my recrea- 
tion.' . . . God had given her a pregnant wit and an excellent mem- 
ory. She was very ripe and perfect in all stories of the Bible, like- 
wise in all the stories of the Martyrs, and could readily turn to 
them; she was also perfect and well seen in the English Chroni- 
cles, and in the descents of the Kings of England. She lived in 
holy wedlock with her liusband twenty years, wanting but four 
days." 

The strength, however, of the Puritan cause lay as yet rather in 
the middle and professional class, than among the small traders or 
the gentry ; and it is in a Puritan of this class that we find the 
fullest and noblest expression of the new influence which was leav- 
ening the temper of the time. Milton is not only the highest, but 
the completest type of Puritanism. His life is absolutely contem- 
porary with that of his cause. He was born when it began to ex- 
ercise a direct power over English politics and English religion ; 
he died when its effort to mould them into its own shape was over, 
and when it had again sunk into one of many influences to which 
we OAve our English character. His earlier verse, the pamphlets 
of his riper years, the epics of his age, mark with a singular pre- 
cision the three great stages in its history. His youth shows us 
how much of the gayety, the poetic ease, the intellectual culture 
of tlie Renascence lingered in a Puritan home. Scrivener and 
" precisian " as his fiither was, he was a skillful musician ; and the 
boy inherited his father's skill on lute and organ. One of the 
finest outbursts in the scheme of education which he put forth at 
a later tiuie is a passage in which he vindicates the province of 
music as an agent in moral training. His home, his tutor, his 
school were all rigidly Puritan ; but there was nothing narrow or 
illiberal in his early training. " My father," he says, " destined 
me while yet a little boy to the study of humane letters ; which 
I seized with such eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age 
I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight." 
But to the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew he learned at school, the scriv- 
ener advised him to add Italian and French. Nor were English 
letters neglected. Spenser gave the earliest turn to his poetic 
genius. In spite of the war between playwright and precisian, a 
Puritan youth could still in Milton's days avow his love of the 
stage, " if Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest Shakspere, 
Fancy's chihjl, warble his native woodnotes wild," and gather from 
the "masques and antique pageantry" of the court-revel hints for 
his own Comus and Arcades. Nor does any shadow of the coming 
struggle with the Church disturb the young scholar's reverie, as 
he wanders beneath " the high embowed roof, with antique pillars, 
massy proof, and storied windows richly dight, casting a dim re- 



460 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ligions light," or as he hears "the pealing organ blow to the full- 
voiced choir below, in service high and anthem clear." His enjoy- 
ments of the gayety of life stands in bright contrast with the gloom 
and sternness of the later Puritanism. In spite of " a certain re- 
servedness of natural disposition," which shrank from "festivities 
and jests, in which I acknowledge my faculty to be very slight," 
the young singer could still enjoy the "jest and youthful jollity " 
of the world around him, of its " quips and cranks and wanton 
wiles ;" he could join the crew of Mirth, and look pleasantly on at 
the village fair, " where the jolly rebecks sound to many a youth 
and many a maid, dancing in the chequered shade." But his 
pleasures were unreproved. There w^as nothing ascetic in his 
look, in his slender, vigorous frame, his face full of a delicate yet 
serious beauty, the rich brown hair which clustered over his brow ; 
and the words we have quotecl show his sensitive enjoyment of all 
that was beautiful. But from coarse or sensual self-indulgence 
the young Puritan turned with disgust : " A certain reservedness 
of nature, an honest haughtiness and self-esteem, kept me still 
above those low descents of mind." He drank in an ideal chival- 
ry from Spenser, but his religion and purity disdained the outer 
pledge on which chivalry built up its ftibric of honor. "Every 
free and gentle spirit," said Milton, " without that oath, ought to 
be born a knight." It was with this temper that he passed from 
his Loudon school, St. Paul's, to Christ's College at Cambridge, 
and it was this temper that he preserved throughout his Universi- 
ty career. He left Cambridge, as he said afterward, " free from 
all reproach, and approved by all honest men," with a purpose of 
self-dedication "to that same lot, however mean or high, toward 
which time leads me, and the will of Heaven." 

Even in the still, calm beauty of a life such as this, we catch the 
sterner tones of the Puritan temper. The very height of its aim, 
the intensity of its moral concentration, brought with them a loss 
of the genial delight in all that was human which distinguished 
the men of the Renascence. " If ever God instilled an intense 
love of moral beauty into the mind of any man," said Milton, "he 
has instilled it into mine." " Love Virtue," closed his Comus; 
" she alone is free !" But the love of virtue and of moral beauty, 
if it gave strength to human conduct, narrowed human sympathy 
and human intelligence. Already in Milton we note " a certain 
reservedness of temper," a contempt for " the false estimates of 
the vulgar," a proud retirement from the meaner and coarser life 
around him. Great as was his love for Shakspere, we can hardly 
fancy him delighting in Falstaff. In minds of a less cultured order, 
this moral tension ended in a hard, unsocial sternness of life. The 
ordinary Puritan, like the housewife of Eastcheap whom we have 
noticed above, " loved all that were godly, much misliking the 
wicked and profane." His bond to other men was not the sense 
of a common manhood, but the recognition of a brotherhood among 
the elect. Without the pale of the saints lay a world Avhich was 
hateful to them, because it was the enemy of their God. It was 
this utter isolation fj-om the " ungodly " that explains the contrast 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



461 



which startles us between the inner tenderness of the Puritans and 
the ruthlessness of so many of their actions. Cromwell, whose 
son's death (in his own words) went to his heart " like a dagger, in- 
deed it did !" and who rode away sad and wearied from the triumph 
of Marston Moor, burst into horse-play as he signed the death- 
warrant of the King. A temper which had thus lost sympathy 
with the life of half the world around it could hardly sympathize 
with the whole of its own life. Humor, the faculty which above 
all corrects exaggeration and extravagance, died away before the 
new stress and strain of existence. The absolute devotion of the 
Puritan to a Supreme Will tended more and more to rob him of 
all sense of measure and proportion in common matters. Little 
things became great things in the glare of religious zeal; and the 
godly man learned to shrink from a surplice, or a mince-pie at 
Christmas, as ha shrank from impurity or a lie. Life became hard, 
rigid, colorless, as it became intense. The play, the geniality, the 
delight of the Elizabethan age were exchanged for a measured 
sobriety, seriousness, and self-restraint. But it was a self-restraint 
and sobriety which limited itself wholly to the outer life. Li the 
inner soul of the Puritan, sense, reason, judgment were overborne 
by the terrible reality of " invisible things." Our first glimpse of 
Oliver Cromwell is as a young country squire and farmer in the 
marsh levels around Huntingdon and St. Ives, buried from time to 
time in a deep melancholy, and haunted by fancies of coming death. 
"I live in Meshac," he writes to a friend, " which they say signifies 
Prolonging ; in Kedar, which signifies Darkness ; yet the Lord 
forsaketh me not." The vivid sense of a Divine Purity close to 
such men made the life of common men seem sin. " You know 
what my manner of life has been," Cromwell adds. "Oh, I lived 
in and loved darkness, and hated light. I hated godliness." Yet 
his worst sin was probably nothing more than an enjoyment of 
the natural buoyancy of youth, and a want of the deeper earnest- 
ness which comes with riper years. In imaginative tempers, like 
that of Bunyan, the struggle took a more picturesque form. John 
Bunyan was the son of a poor tinker at Elstow in Bedfordshire, 
and even in childhood his fancy reveled in. terrible visions of 
Heaven and Hell. " When I was but a child of nine or ten years 
old," he tells us, "these things did so distress my soul, that then 
in the midst of my merry sports and childish vanities, amid my 
vain companions, I was often much cast down and afflicted in my 
mind therewith ; yet could I not let go my sins." The sins he 
could not let go were a love of hockey and of dancing on the vil- 
lage green ; for the only real fault which his bitter self-accusation 
discloses, that of a habit of swearing, was put an end to at once 
and forever by a rebuke from an old woman. His passion for 
bell-ringing clung to him even after he had broken from it as a 
"vain practice;" and he would go to the steeple-house and look 
on, till the thought that a bell might fall and crush him in his sins 
drove him panic-stricken from the door. A sermon against danc- 
ing and games drew him for a time from these indulgences ; but 
tlie temptation again overmastered his resolve. "I shook the ser- 



462 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



mon out of my mind, and to my old custom of sports and gaming 
I returned with great delight. But the same day, as I was in the 
midst of a game of cat, and having struck it one blow from the 
hole, just as I was about to strike it the second time, a voice did 
suddenly dart from Pleaveu into my soul, which said, ' Wilt thou 
leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to Hell?' 
At this I was put in an exceeding maze ; wherefore, leaving my 
cat upon the ground, I looked up to Heaven ; and was as if I had 
with the eyes of my understanding seen the Lord Jesus looking 
down upon me, as being very holly displeased with me, and as if 
Pie did severely threaten me with some grievous punishment for 
those and other ungodly practices." 

Sacli was Puritanism, and it is of the highest importance to real- 
ize it thus in itself, in its greatness and its littleness, apart from 
the ecclesiastical system of Presbyterianism with which it is so 
often confounded. As we shall see in the course of our story, not 
one of the leading Puritans of the Long Parliament was a Presby- 
terian. Pym and Hampden had no sort of objection to Episcopa- 
cy, and the adoi^tion of the Presbyterian system was only forced 
on the Puritan patriots in their later struggle bj^ political consid- 
erations. But the growth of the movement, which thus influenced 
our liistory for a time, forms one of the most curious episodes in 
Elizabeth's reign. Her Church policy rested on the Acts of Su- 
premacy and of Uniformity ; the first of which placed all ecclesias- 
tical jurisdiction and legislative power in the hands of the State, 
while the second prescribed a course of doctrine and discipline, 
from wliicli no variation was legally permissible. For the nation 
at large, the system which was thus adopted was no doubt a wise 
and a healthy one. Single-handed, and unsupported by any of the 
statesmen or divines of their time, the Queen and the Primate 
forced on the warring religions a sort of armed truce. The main 
principles of the Reformation were accepted, but the zeal of the 
ultra-reformers was held at bay. The Bible was left ojDcn, private 
discussion was unrestrained, but the warfare of pulpit against pul- 
pit was silenced by the licensing of preachers. An outer con- 
formity, and attendance at public worship, was exacted from all ; 
but the changes in ritual, by which the zealots of Geneva gave 
prominence to the radical features of the religious change which 
was passing over the country, were steadily resisted. While En- 
gland was struggling for existence, this balanced attitude of the 
Crown reflected faithfully enough the balanced attitude of the 
nation ; but with the death of Mary Stuart the danger was over, 
and a marked change in public sentiment became at once observa- 
ble. Unhappily no corresponding change took place in the Queen. 
With the religious enthusiasm which was growing up around her 
she had no sympathy whatever. Her passion was for moderation, 
her aim was simply civil order; and both order and moderation 
were threatened, as she held, by the knot of clerical bigots who 
gathered from this hour under the banner of Presbyterianism, 
Of these Thomas Cartwright was the chief He had studied at 
Geneva; he returned with a fanatical faith in Calvinism, and in 



VII I. J 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



463 



the system of Church government which Calvin had devised; and 
as Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge he used to the 
full the opportunities which his chair gave him of propagating his 
opinions. JSTo leader of a religious party ever deserved less of 
after sympathy than Cartwright. He was unquestionably learned 
and devout, but his bigotry was that of a mediaeval inquisitor. 
The relics of the old ritual, the cross in baptism, the surplice, the 
giving of a ring in marriage, were to him not merely distasteful, 
as they were to the Puritans at large — they were idolatrous and 
the mark of the beast. His declamations against ceremonies and 
superstition however had little weight with Elizabeth or her 
Primates ; what scared them was his reckless advocacy of a scheme 
of ecclesiastical government which j)laced the State beneath the 
feet of the Church. The absolute rule of bishops, indeed, he de- 
nounced as begotten of the devil ; but the absolute rule of Pres- 
byters he held to be established by the Word of God, For the 
Church modeled after the fashion of Geneva he claimed an au- 
thority which surpassed the wildest dreams of the masters of the 
Vatican. All spiritual power and jurisdiction, the decreeing of 
doctrine, the ordering of ceremonies, lay wholly, according to his 
Calvinistic creed, in the hands of the ministers of the Church. To 
them, too, belonged the supervision of public morals. In an or- 
dered arrangement of classes and synods, they were to govern 
their flocks, to regulate their own order, to decide in matters of 
faith, to administer " discipline." Their weapon was excommimi- 
cation, and they were responsible for its use to none but Christ. 
The province of the civil ruler was simjDly " to see their decrees 
executed, and to punish the contemners of them," for the spirit of 
such a system as this naturally excluded all toleration of practice 
or belief. With the despotism of a Hildebrand, Cartwright com- 
bined the cruelty of a Torquemada. ISTot only was Presby terian- 
ism to be established as the one legal form of Church government, 
but all other forms. Episcopalian and Separatist, were to be ruth- 
lessly put down. For heresy there was the punishment of death. 
Never had the doctrine of persecution been urged with such a 
blind and reckless ferocity. " I deny," wrote Cartwright, " that 
upon repentance there ought to follow any pardon of death. . . . 
Heretics ought to be put to death now. If this be bloody and ex- 
treme, I am content to be so counted with the Holy Ghost." 

Opinions such as these might wisely have been left to be re- 
futed by the good sense of the people itself. They found, in fact, a 
crushing answer in the " Ecclesiastical Polity " of Richard Hooker, 
a clergyman who had been Master of the Temple, but whose dis- 
taste for the controversies of its pulpit drove him from London 
to a* Wiltshire vicarage at Boscombe, which he exchanged at a 
later time for the parsonage of Bishopsbourne, among the quiet 
meadows of Kent. The largeness of temper which characterized 
all the nobler minds of his day, the philosoj^hic breadth which is 
seen as clearly in Shakspere as in Bacon, was united in Hooker 
with a grandeur and stateliness of style which raised him to the 
highest rank among English prose writers. Divine as he was, his , 



464 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



spirit and method were jDhilosophical rather than theological. 
Against the ecclesiastical dogmatism of Cartwright he set the 
authority of reason. He abandoned the narrow ground of Script- 
ural argument to base his conclusions on the general principles 
of moral and political science, on the eternal obligations of nat- 
ural law. The Presbyterian system rested on the assumption 
that an immutable rule for human action, in all matters relating 
to religion, to worship, and to the discipline and constitution of 
the Church, was laid down, and only laid down, in Scripture. 
Hooker urged that a Divine order exists, not in written revela- 
tion only, but in the moral relations, and the social and political 
institutions of men. He claimed for human reason the province 
of determining the laws of this order; of distinguishing between 
what is changeable and unchangeable in them, between what is 
eternal and what is temporary in Scripture itself. It was easy 
for him to push on to the field of theological controversy which 
Cartwright had chosen, to show historically that no form of 
Church government had ever been of indispensable obligation, 
and tliat ritual observances had in all ages been left to the dis- 
cretion of Churches, and determined by the differences of times. 
But the truth on which he rested his argument against the dog- 
matism of the Presbyterian is of far higher A'alne than his argu- 
ment itself; for it is the truth against which ecclesiastical dogma- 
tism, whether of the Presbyterian or the Catholic, must alwaji-s 
shatter itself. The "Ecclesiastical Polity" appealed rather to 
the broad sense and intelligence of Englishmen than to tlie learn- 
ing of divines, but its appeal was hardly needed. Popular as the 
Presbyterian system became in Scotland, it never took any pop- 
ular hold on England ; it remained to the last a clerical rather 
than a national creed, and even in the moment of its seeming tri- 
umph under the Commonwealth it was rejected by every part of 
England save London and Lancashire. I3ut the bold challenge 
to the Government which was delivered in Cartwright's "Ad- 
monition to the Parliament" had raised a panic among English 
statesmen and prelates which cut off all hopes of a quiet appeal 
to reason. It is probable that, but for the storm which Cart- 
wright raised, the steady growth of general discontent with the 
ritualistic usages he denounced would have brought about their 
abolition. The Parliament of 1571 not only refused to bind the 
clergy to subscription to three articles on the Supremacy, the 
form of Church government, and the power of tlie Church to or- 
dain rites and ceremonies, but fovored the project of reforming 
the Liturgy by the omission of the superstitious j)ractices. But 
with the appearance of the "Admonition" this natural progress 
of opinion abruptly ceased. The moderate statesmen who' had 
pressed for a change in ritual withdrew from union Avith a party 
which revived the worst pretensions of the Papacy. Parker's 
hand pressed heavier than before on nonconforming ministers, 
while Elizabeth was provoked to a measure which forms the 
worst blot on her reign. 

Her establishment of the Ecclesiastical Commission in fact con- 



VIII. ] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



46c 



verted the religious truce into a spiritual despotism. From being 
a temporary board which represented the Royal Supremacy' in 
matters ecclesiastical, the Commission was now turned into a 
permanent body wielding the almost unlimited powers of the 
Crown. All opinions or acts contrary to the Statutes of Suprem- 
acy and Uniformity fell within its cognizance. A right of depri- 
vation placed the clergy at its mercy. It had power to alter or 
amend the Statutes of Colleges or Schools. Not only heresy and 
schism and nonconformity, but incest or aggravated adultery 
were held to fall within its scope : its means of inquiry were left 
without limit, and it might fine or imprison at its will. By the 
mere establishment of such a Court half the work of the Refor- 
mation was undone; but the large number of civilians on the 
board seemed to furnish some security against the excess of ec- 
clesiastical tyranny. Of its forty-four commissioners, however, fev/ 
actually took any part in its proceedings; and the powers of the 
Commission were practically left in the hands of the successive 
Primates. No Archbishop of Canterbury since the days of Au- 
gustine had wielded an authority so vast, so utterly despotic, as 
that of Parker and Whitgift and Bancroft and Abbot and Laud. 
The most terrible feature of their spiritual tyranny was its wholly 
personal character. The old symbols of doctrine were gone, and 
the lawyers had not yet stepped in to protect the clergy by defin- 
ing the exact limits of the new. The result was that at the 
Commission-board at Lambeth the Primates created their own 
tests of doctrine with an utter indifference to those created by 
law. In one instance Parker deprived a vicar of his benefice for 
a denial of the verbal inspiration of the Bible. Nor did the suc- 
cessive Archbishops care greatly if the test were a varying or a 
conflicting one. Whitgift strove to force on the Church the Cal- 
vinistic snpralapsarianism of his Lambeth Articles. Bancroft, 
who followed him, was as earnest in enforcing his anti-Calvinistic 
dogma of the Divine right of the episcopate. Abbot had no mer- 
cy for Erastians. Laud had none for anti-Erastians. It is no 
wonder that the Ecclesiastical Commission, which these men rep- 
resented, soon stank in the nostrils of the English clergy. Its es- 
tablishment however marked the adoption of a distinct policy on 
the part of the Crown, and its efforts were backed by stern meas- 
ures of repression. AH preaching or reading in private houses 
was forbidden ; and in spite of the refusal of Parliament to en- 
force the requirement of them by law, subscription to the Three 
Articles was exacted from every member of the clergy. 

For the moment these measures were crowned with success; 
The movement under Cartwright was checked ; Cartwright him- 
self was driven from his Professorship ; and an outer uniformity 
of worship was more and more brought about by tlie steady press- 
ure of the Commission. The old liberty which had been allowed 
in London and the other Protestant parts of the kingdom was no 
longer' permitted to exist. The leading Puritan clergy, whose 
nonconformity had hitherto been winked at, were called upon to 
submit to the surplice, and to make the sign of the cross. The 

30 



466 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



remonstrances of the country gentry availed as little as the pro- 
test of Lord Burleigh himself to protect two hundred of the best 
ministers, who were driven from their parsonages on their refusal 
to subscribe to the Three Articles. But the result of this perse- 
cution Avas simply to give a fresh life and popularity to the doc- 
trines which it aimed at crushing, by drawing together two cur- 
rents of opinion which were in themselves perfectly distinct. The 
Presbyterian platform of Church discipline had as yet been em- 
braced by the clergy only, and by few among the clergy. On the 
other hand, the wish for a reform in the Liturgy, the dislike of 
" superstitious usages," of the use of the surplice, the sign of the 
cross in baptism, the gift of the ring in marriage, the posture of 
kneeling at the Lord's Supper, was shared by a large number of 
the clergy and laity alike. At the opening of Elizabeth's reign 
almost all the higher Churchmen but Parker were opposed to 
them, and a motion for their abolition in Convocation was lost 
but by a single vote. The temper of the country gentlemen on 
this subject was indicated by that of Parliament; and it was well 
known tliat the wisest of the Queen's Councilors, Burleigh, Wal- 
singham, and KnoUys, were at one in this matter with the gentry. 
If their common persecution did not wholly succeed in fusing 
these two sections of religious opinion into one, it at any rate 
gained for the Presbyterians a general sympathy on the part of 
the Puritans, which raised them from a clerical clique into a pop- 
ular party. Nor were the consequences of the persecution limit- 
ed to the strengthening of the Presbyterians. The " Separatists," 
who were beginning to withdraw from attendance at public wor- 
ship, on the ground that the very existence of a national Church* 
was contrary to the Word of God, grew quickly from a few scat- 
tered zealots to twenty thousand souls. Congregations of these 
Independents — or, as they were called at this time, from the name 
of their founder, Brownists — formed rapidly throughout England; 
and persecution on the part of the Bishops and the Presbyterians, 
to both of whom their opinions were equally hateful, drove flocks 
of refugees over sea. So great a future awaited one of these con- 
gregations that we may pause to get a glimpse of " a poor peo- 
ple" in Lincolnshire and the neighborhood, who, " being enlight- 
ened by the Word of God," and their members " urged with the 
yoke of subscription," had been led " to see further." They reject- 
ed ceremonies as relics of idolatry, the rule of bishops as unscript- 
ural, and joined themselves, " as the Lord's free jDeople," into " a 
church estate on the fellowship of the Gospel." Choosing John 
Robinson as their minister, they felt their way forward to the 
great principle of liberty of conscience ; and asserted their Chris- 
tian right "to walk in all the ways which God had made known 
or should make known to them." Their meetings or "conventi- 
cles", soon drew down the heavy hand of the law, and the little 
company resolved to seek a refuge in other lands ; but their first 
attempt at flight was prevented, and w^hen they made another 
their wives and children were seized at the very moment of enter- 
ing the ship. At last, however, the magistrates gave a contempt- 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



46' 



uous assent to their project ; they were in fact " glad to be rid of 
them at any price;" and the fugitives found shelter at Amster- 
dam. "They knew they were pilgrims and looked not much on 
these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest coun- 
try, and quieted their spirits." Among this little band of exiles 
were those who were to become famous at a later time as the Pil- 
grim Fathers of the Mayflower. 

It was easy to be " rid " of the Brownists ; but the political dan- 
ger of the course on which the Crown had entered was seen in 
the rise of a spirit of vigorous opposition, such as had not made 
its appearance since the accession of the Tudors. The growing- 
power of public opinion received a striking recognition in the 
struggle which bears the name of the "Martin Marprelate contro- 
versy." The Puritans had from the first appealed by their pam- 
phlets from the Crown to the people, and Whitgift bore witness 
to their influence on opinion by his efforts to gag the Press. 
Tlie regulations of the Star-Chamber for this purpose are mem- 
orable as the first step in the long struggle of government after 
government to check the liberty of printing. The irregular cen- 
sorship which had long existed was now finally organized. Print- 
ing was restricted to London and the two Universities, the num- 
ber of printers reduced, and all candidates for license to print 
placed under the supervision of the Company of Stationers. Ev- 
ery publication too, great or small, had to receive the approbation 
of the Primate or the Bishop of London. The first result of this 
system of rejsression was the appearance, in the very year of the 
Armada, of a series of anonymous pamphlets bearing the signif- 
icant name of "Martin Marprelate," and issued from a secret 
press, which found refuge from the Royal pursuivants in the 
country-houses of the gentry. The press was at last seized; and 
the suspected authors of these scurrilous libels, Penry, a young 
Welshman, and a minister named Udall, died, the one in prison, 
tlie other on the scaffold. But the virulence and boldness of 
their language produced a powerful effect, for it was impossible 
under the system of Elizabeth to " mar " the bishops without at- 
tacking the Crown ; and a new age of political liberty was felt 
to be at hand when Martin Marprelate forced the political and 
ecclesiastical measures of the Government into the arena of pub- 
lic discussion. The suppression, indeed, of these pamphlets was 
far from damping the courage of the Presbyterians. Cartwright, 
who had been appointed by Lord Leicester to the mastership of 
a hospital at Warwick, was bold enough to organize his system 
of Church discipline among the clergy of that county and of 
Northamptonshire. The example was widely followed; and the 
general gatherings of the whole ministerial body of the clergy, 
and the smaller assemblies for each diocese or shire, which in the 
Presbyterian scheme bore the name of Synods and Classes, began 
to be held in many parts of England for the purposes of debate 
and consultation. The new organization was quickly suppressed 
indeed, but Cartwright was saved from the banishment which 
Whitgift demanded by a promise of submission ; and the strug- 



468 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



gle, transferred to the higher sphere of the Parliament, widened 
into the great contest for liberty under James, and the Civil War 
under his successor. 



Sectlou II.— The First of tiac Stuarts. 1604— 1G23. 

[Authorities. — Mr. Gardiner's " History of England from the Accession of 
James I.," continued in liis "History of the Spanish Marriages," is invaluable for 
its fullness and good sense, as well as for the amount of fresh information collected 
in it. Camden's ' ' Annals of James I. , " with the King's own works, are useful 
as contemporary authorities. Winwood's "Memorials of State" contain the more 
important documents. Hacket's "Life of Williams" and Harrington's "Nugaj 
Antique " give us valuable side-light for the general politics of the time. For the 
last two Parliaments, see "Debates and Proceedings of the House of Commons," 
Oxford, 1766. Mr. Spedding's "Life and Letters of Lord Bacon," as well as his 
edition of his Works, are indispensable for a knowledge of the period.] 



To judge fairly the attitude and policy of the English Puritans — 
that is, of three fourths of the Protestants of England — at this 
moment, we must cursorily review the fortunes of Protestantism 
during the reign of Elizabeth. At the Queen's accession, the suc- 
cess of the Reformation seemed almost every where secure. Al- 
ready triumphant in the north of Germany, the Pacification of 
Passau was a signal for a beginning of its conquest of the south. 
The Emperor Maximilian was believed to be wavering in the faith. 
Throughout Austria and Hungary, the nobles and burghers aban- 
doned Catholicism in a mass, A Venetian embassador estimated 
the German Catholics at little more than one tenth of the wholev 
population of Germany, The Scandinavian kingdoms embraced 
the new fiith, and it mastered at once the eastern and western 
States of Europe, In Poland the majority of the nobles became 
Protestants, Scotland flung ofl:' Catholicism under Mary, and 
England veered around again to Protestantism under Elizabeth. 
At the same moment, the death of Henry the Second opened a 
way for the rapid diflfusion of the new doctrines in France. Only 
where the dead hand of Sj^ain lay heavy, in Castile, in Aragon, 
or in Italy, was the Reformation thoroughly crushed out ; and 
even the dead hand of Spain failed to crush heresy in the Low 
Countries, But at the very instant of its seeming triumph, the 
advance of the new religion was suddenly arrested. The first 
twenty years of Elizabeth's reign were a period of suspense. The 
progress of Protestantism gradually ceased. It wasted its strength 
in theological controversies and persecutions, above all in the 
bitter and venomous discussions between the Churches which fol- 
lowed Luther and the Churches which followed Calvin, It Avas 
degraded and weakened by the prostitution of the Refoi-mation 
to political ends, by the greed and worthlessness of the German 
princes who espoused its cause, by the factious lawlessness of the 
nobles in Poland and of the Huguenots in France. Meanwhile the 
Papacy succeeded in rallying the Catholic world around the Coun- 
cil of Trent. The Roman Church, enfeebled and corrupted by the 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



469 



triumph of ages, felt at last the uses of advevsity. Her faith was 
settled and defined. Tlie most crying among the ecclesiastical 
abuses which had provoked the movement of the Reformation 
were sternly put down. The enthusiasm of the Protestants 
roused a counter enthusiasm among their opponents; new relig- 
ious orders rose to meet the wants of the day; the Capuchins be- 
came the preachers of Catholicism ; the Jesuits became not only 
its preachers, but its directors, its schoolmasters, its missionaries, 
its diplomatists. Their organization, their blind obedience, their 
real ability, their flinatical zeal galvanized the pulpit, the school, 
the confessional into a new life. If the Protestants had enjoyed 
the profitable monopoly of martyrdom at the opening of the cent- 
ury, the Catholics won a fair share of it as soon as the disciples 
of Loyola came to the front. The tracts which pictured the tor- 
tures of Campion and Southwell roused much the same fire at 
Toledo or Vienna as the pages of Foxe had roused in England. 
Even learning passed gradually over to the side of the older faith. 
Bellarmine, the greatest of controversialists at this time, Baro- 
nius, the most erudite of Church historians, were both Catholics. 
With a growing inequalit}'' of strength such as this, we can hardly 
Avonder that the tide was seen at last to turn. A few years be- 
fore the fight with the Armada Catholicism began definitely to 
win ground. Southern Germany, where the Austrian House, so 
long lukewarm in its faith, had at last become zealots in its de- 
fense, was the first country to be re-Catholicized. The success of 
Socinianism in Poland severed that kingdom from any real com- 
munion with the general body of the Protestant Churches ; and 
these again were more and more divided into two warring camps 
by the controversies about the Sacrament and Free Will. Every 
where the Jesuits won converts, and their peaceful victories were 
soon backed by the arm of Spain. In the fierce struggle which 
followed, Philip was undoubtedly worsted. England Avas saved 
by its defeat of the Armada; the United Provinces of the Neth- 
erlands rose into a great Protestant power through their own clog- 
ged heroism and the genius of William the Silent. France was 
rescued, at the moment when all hope seemed gone, by the uncon- 
querable energy of Henry of Navarre. But even in its defeat 
Catholicism gained ground. In the Low Countries, the Reforma- 
tion Avas driven from the Walloon provinces, from Brabant, and 
from Flanders. In France, Henry the Fourth found himself 
obliged to purchase Paris by a mass ; and the conversion of the 
King was followed by a quiet dissolution of the Huguenot party. 
Nobles and scholars alike forsook Protestantism ; and though the 
Reformation remained dominant south of the Loire, it lost all 
hope of winning the country as a Avhole to its side. 

At the death of Elizabeth, therefore, the temper of every 
Protestant, Avhether in England or abroad, Avas that of a man 
Avho, after cherishing the hope of a croAvning victory, is forced 
to look on at a crushing and irremediable defeat. The dream of 
a reformation of the universal Church Avas utterly at an end. 
The borders of Protestantism Avere narrowing CA^ery day, nor 



470 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



was there a sign that the tiiumph of the Papacy was arrested. 
The accession of James indeed raised the hopes of the Catholics 
in England itself; he had intrigued for their support before the 
Queen's death, and their persecution was relaxed for a while after 
he had mounted the throne. But it soon began again with even 
greater severity than of old, and six thousand Catholics were 
presented as recusants in a single year. Hopeless of aid from 
abroad, or of success in an open rising at home, a small knot 
of desj)erate men, with Robert Catesby, who had been engaged 
in the plot of Essex, at their head, resolved to destroy at a blow 
both King and Parliament. Barrels of powder were placed in a 
cellar beneath the Parliament House ; and while waiting for the 
fifth of November, when the Parliament Avas summoned to meet, 
the plans of the little group widened into a formidable conspir- 
acy. Catholics of greater fortune, such as Sir Edward Digby and 
Francis Tresham, were admitted to their confidence, and supplied 
money for the larger projects they designed. Arms were bought 
in Flanders, horses were held in readiness, a meeting of Catholic 
gentlemen was brought about, under show of a hunting-party, to 
serve as the beginning of a rising. The destruction of tiie King 
was to be followed by the seizure of the King's children and an 
open revolt, in wliieh aid might be called for from the Spaniards 
in Flanders. Wonderful as was the secrecy with which the plot 
was concealed, tlie cowardice of Tresham at the last moment 
gave a clew to it by a letter to Lord Monteagle, his relative, 
which warned him to absent himself from the Parliament on the 
fatal day; and further information brought about the discovery 
of the cellar and of Guido Fawkes, a soldier of fortune, who was' 
charged with the custody of it. The hunting-party broke up in 
despair, the conspirators were chased from county to county, and 
either killed or sent to the block, and Garnet, tlie Provincial of 
the English Jesuits, was brought to solemn trial. He had shrunk 
from all part in the plot, but its existence had been made known 
to him by another Jesuit, Greenway, and, horror-stricken as he 
repi-esented himself to have been, he had kept the secret and left 
the Parliament to its doom. We can hardly wonder that a frenzy 
of horror and dread filled the minds of English Protestants at 
such a discovery. What intensified the dread was a sense of de- 
fection and uncertainty within tlie pale of the Church of England 
itself. No men could be more opposed in their tendencies to 
one another than the High Churchmen, such as Laud, and the 
English Latitudinarian, such as Hales. But to the ordinary En- 
glish Protestant both Latitudinarian and High Churchmen were 
equally hateful. To him the struggle with the Papacy was not 
one for compromise or comprehension. It was a struggle between 
light and darkness, between life and death. Every Protestant 
doctrine, from the least to the greatest, was equally true and 
equally sacred. No innovation in faith or worship was of small 
account if it tended in the direction of Rome, Ceremonies, 
which in an hour of triumph might have been allowed as solaces 
to weak brethren, became insufierable when they were turned by 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



471 



■weak brethven into a means of drawing nearer to the enemy in 
the hour of defeat. The peril was too close at hand to allow of 
compromises. Now that falsehood was gaining ground, the only 
security for truth was to di*aw a hard and fast line between truth 
and falsehood. It is a temj)er such as this that we trace in the 
Millenary Petition (as it was called), Avhich was presented to 
James the First on his accession by nearly eight hundred clergy- 
men, a tenth of the whole number in his realm. Its tone was not 
Presbyterian, but strictly Puritan. It asked for no change in the 
government or organization of the Church, but for a reform in 
the Church courts, the provision and training of godly ministers, 
and the suppression of "Popish usages" in the Book of Common 
Prayer. Even those who Avere most opposed to the Presbyterian 
scheme agreed as to the necessity of some concession on points 
of this sort. " Why," asked Bacon, " should the civil state be 
purged and restored by good and wholesome laws made every 
three years in Parliament assembled, devising remedies as fast as 
time breedeth mischief; and contrariwise the ecclesiastical state 
still continue upon the dregs of time, and receive no alteration 
these forty-five years or more." A general exj)ectation, in fact, 
prevailed that, now the Queen's opposition was removed, some- 
thing would be done. But, diiFerent as his theological temper 
was from the purely secular temjaer of Elizabeth, her successor 
Avas equally resolute against all changes in Church matters. 

No sovereign could have jarred against the conception of an 
English i-uler which had grown up under the Tudors more utterly 
than James the First. i3is big head, his slobbering tongue, his 
quilted clothes, his rickety legs, his goggle eyes, stood out in as 
grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry or Eliza- 
beth as his gabble and rodomontade, his want of personal dignity, 
his coarse buffoonery, his drunkenness, his pedantry, his contempti- 
ble cowardice. Under this ridiculous exterior however lay a man 
of much natural ability, a ripe scholar, Avith a considerable fund 
of shrewdness, of mother Avit, and ready repartee. His canny 
humor lights up the political and theological controversies of the 
time with quaint incisive phrases, Avith puns and epigrams and 
touches of irony, Avhich still retain their savor. His reading, 
especially in theological matters, Avas extensive ; and he Avas a 
voluminous author on subjects which ranged from Predestinarian- 
ism to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, 
in the phrase of Henry the Fourth, " the Avisest fool in Christen- 
dom." He had the temper of a pedant; and Avith it a pedant's 
love of theories, and a pedant's inability to bring his theories into 
any relation Avith actual facts. All might have gone Avell had he 
confined himself to speculations about Avitchcraft, about predestina- 
tion, about the noxiousness of smoking. Unhappily for England 
and for his successor, he clung yet more passionately to tAvo theo- 
ries which contained Avithin them the seeds of a death-struggle 
between his people and the Crown. The first Avas that of a Di- 
vine right of Kings. Even before his accession to the English 
throne, he had formulated the theory of an absolute royalty in 



472 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



his work on "The True Law of Free Monarchy;" and announced 
that, " although a good king will frame his actions to be accord- 
ing to law, yet he is not bound thereto, but of his own will and 
for example-giving to his subjects." The notion was a wholly 
new one ; and, like most of James's notions, was founded simply 
on a blunder, or at the best on a play upon words. "An absolute 
king," or " an absolute monarchy," meant, with the Tudor states- 
men who used the phrase, a sovereign or rule complete in them- 
selves, and independent of all foreign or Papal interference. 
James chose to regard the Avords as implying the monarch's free- 
dom from all control by law, or from responsibility to any thing 
but his own royal will. The King's blunder, however, became a 
system of government, a doctrine which bishops preached from 
the pulpit, and for which brave men laid their heads on the block. 
The Church was quick to adopt its sovereign's discovery. Con- 
vocation in its book of Canons denounced as a fatal error the as- 
sertion that "all civil power, jurisdiction, and authority were first 
derived from the people and disordered multitude, or either is 
originally still in them, or else is deduced by their consent natui'- 
ally from them, and is not God's ordinance originally descending 
from Him and depending upon Him." In strict accordance with 
James's theory, these doctors declared sovereignty in its origin 
to be the prerogative of birthright, and inculcated passive obedi- 
ence to the monarch as a religious obligation. Cowell, a civilian, 
followed up the discoveries of Convocation by an announcement 
that " the King is above the law by his absolute power," and 
that, " notwithstanding his oath, he may alter and suspend any 
particular law that seeraeth hurtful to the public estate." The 
book was suppressed on the remonstrance of the House of Com- 
mons, but the party of passive obedience grew fast. A few years 
before the King's death, the University of Oxford decreed solemn- 
ly that " it was in no case lawful for subjects to make use offeree 
against their princes, or to appear oifensively or defensively in 
the field against them." The King's "arrogant speeches," if they 
roused resentment in the Parliaments to which they were ad- 
dressed, created by sheer force of repetition a certain belief in the 
arbitrary right they challenged for the Crown. We may give 
one instance of their tone from a speech delivered in the Star- 
Chamber. "As it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what 
God can do," said James, "so it is. presumption and a high con- 
tempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do, or to say that 
a king can not do this or that." A few years after his accession 
his words had startled English ears with a sense of coming dan- 
ger to the national liberty. " If the practice should follow the 
positions," was the comment of a thoughtful observer, " we are 
not likely to leave to our successors that freedom we received 
from our forefathers." 

It is necessary to weigh, throughout the course of James's 
reign, this aggressive attitude of the Crown, if we would rightly 
judge what seems at first sight to be an aggressive tone in some 
of the proceedings of the Parliaments. With new claims of 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



473 



power such as these befove them, to have stood still would have 
been ruin. The claim, too, was one which jarred against all that 
was noblest in the Puritan tone of the time. The temper of the 
Puritan was eminently a temper of law. The diligence with 
which he searched the Scriptures sprang from his earnestness to 
discover a Divine Will which in all things, great or small, he 
might implicitly obey. But this implicit obedience was reserved 
for the Divine Will alone ; for human ordinances derived their 
strength only from their correspondence with the revealed law 
of God. The Puritan was bound by his very religion to examine 
every claim made on his civil and spiritual obedience by the 
]DOwers that be ; and to own or reject the claim, as it accorded 
with the higher duty which he owed to God. "In matters of 
faith," Mrs. Hutchinson tells us of her husband, " his reason al- 
ways submitted to the Word of God ; but in all other things the 
greatest names in the world would not lead him without reason." 
It was plain that an in:!passable gulf parted such a temper as this 
fi-om the temper of unquestioning devotion to the Crown which 
James demanded. It was a temper not only legal, but even 
pedantic in its legality, intolerant — from its very sense of a mor- 
al order and law — of the lawlessness and disorder of a personal 
tyranny ; a temper of criticism, of judgment, and, if need be, of 
stubborn and unconquerable resistance ; of a resistance which 
sprang, not from the disdain of authority, but from the Puritan's 
devotion to an authority higher than that of kings. But if the 
theory of a Divine right of Kings was certain to rouse against it 
all the nobler energies of Puritanism, there was something which 
roused its nobler and its pettier instincts of resistance alike in 
James's second theory of a Divine right of Bishops. Elizabeth's 
conception of her Ecclesiastical Supremacy had been a sore 
stumbling-block to her subjects, but Elizabeth at least regarded 
the Supremacy simply as a branch of her ordinary prerogative. 
Not only were the clergy her subjects, but they were more her 
subjects than the laity. She treated them, in fact, as her predeces- 
sors had treated the Jews. If she allowed nobody else to abuse 
or to rob them, she robbed and abused them herself to her heart's 
content. But the theory which James held as to Church and 
State was as different from that of Elizabeth as the theological 
bent of his mind was different from her secular temper. His 
patristic reading had left behind it the belief in a Divine right 
of Bishops, as sacred and as absolute as the Divine right of Kings. 
Unbroken episcopal succession and hereditary regal succession 
Avere with the new sovereign the inviolable bases of Church and 
State. The two systems confirmed and supported each other. 
" No bishop, no king," ran the fomous formula which embodied 
the King's theory. But behind his intellectual convictions lay a 
host of prejudices derived from his youth. The Scotch Presbyters 
had insulted and frightened him in the early days of his reign, 
and he chose to confound Puritanism with Presbyterianism. No 
prejudice, however, was really required "to suggest his course. In 
itself it was logical, and consistent with the premises from which 



474 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



it started. The very ceremonies which the Puritans denounced 
were ceremonies which had plenty of authority in the writings of 
the Fathers. That they were offensive to consciences seemed to 
the King no reason whatever for suppressing them. It was for 
the Christian to submit, as it Avas for the subject to submit, and 
to leave these high matters to bishops and princes for decision. 
If James accepted the Millenarian Petition, and summoned a con- 
ference of prelates and Puritan divines at Hampton Court, it was 
not for any real discussion of the grievances alleged, but for the 
display of his own theological learning. The bishops had the wit 
to declare that the insults he showered on their opponents were 
dictated by the Holy Ghost. The Puritans still ventured to dis- 
pute his infallibility. James broke up the conference with a 
threat which revealed the policy of the Crown. "I will make 
them conform," he said of the remonstrants, " or I will harry 
them out of the land." 

It is only by thoroughly realizing the temper of the nation on 
religious and civil subjects, and the temper of the King, that we 
can understand the long Parliamentary conflict which occupied 
the whole of James's reign. But to make its details intelligible 
we must briefly review the relations which existed at his acces- 
sion between the two Houses and the Crown, In an earlier part 
of this work we have noted the contrast between Wolsey and 
Cromwell in their dealings with the Parliament. The wary pre- 
science of the first had seen in it, even in its degradation under 
the Tudors, the memorial of an older freedom, and a centre of 
national resistance to the new despotism which Henry was estab- 
lishing, should the nation ever rouse itself to resist. Never per- 
haps was English liberty in such deadly peril as Avhen Wolsey re- 
solved on the practical suppression of the two Houses. But the 
bolder genius of Cromwell set contemptuously aside the appre- 
hensions of his predecessor. His confidence in the power of the 
Crown revived the Parliament as an easy and manageable instru- 
ment of tyrannj^ The old forms of constitutional freedom were 
turned to the profit of the Royal despotism, and a revolution 
which for the moment left England absolutely at Henry's feet 
was wrought out by a series of Parliamentary Statutes. Through- 
out Henry's reign Cromwell's confidence seemed justified by the 
spirit of slavish submission which pervaded the Houses. On only 
one occasion did the Commons refuse to pass a bill brought for- 
ward by the Crown. But the efiect of the great religious change 
for which Cromwell's ineasures made room began to be felt during 
the minority of Edward the Sixth; and the debates and divisions 
on the religious reaction which Mary pressed on the Parliament 
were many and violent. A great step forward was marked by 
the effort of the Crown to neutralize by "management" an op- 
position which it could no longer overawe. An unscrupulous use 
of the Royal prerogative packed the Parliament with nominees 
of the Crown. . Twenty-two new boroughs were created under 
Edward, fourteen under Mary; some, indeed, places entitled to 
representation by their wealth and population, but the bulk of 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



47i 



tliem small towns or hamlets which lay wholly at the disposal of 
the Royal Council. But the increasing pressure of the two Houses 
was seen in the further step on which Edward's Council ventured 
in issuing a circular to the Sheriffs, in which they were ordered 
to set all freedom of election aside. Where the Council recom- 
mended "men of learning and wisdom" — in other words, men com- 
pliant with its will — there its directions were to be "regarded and 
well followed." Elizabeth, though with greater caution, adopted 
the system of her two predecessors, both in the creation of bor- 
oughs and the recommendation of candidates ; but her keen po- 
ll ttcal instinct soon perceived the uselessness of both expedients. 
She fell back as far as she could on Wolsey's policy of practical 
abolition, and summoned Parliaments at longer and longer inter- 
vals. By rigid economy, by a policy of balance and peace, she 
strove, and for a long time successfully strove, to avoid the ne- 
cessity of assembling them at all. But Mary of Scotland and 
Philip of Spain proved friends to English liberty in its sorest 
need. The death-struggle with Catholicism forced Elizabeth to 
have recourse to her Parliament, and as she was driven to appeal 
for increasing supplies the tone of the Parliament rose higher and 
higher. On the question of taxation or monopolies her fierce 
spirit was forced to give way to its demands. On the question 
of religion she refused all concession, and England was driven to 
await a change of system from her successor. But it is clear, 
from the earlier acts of his reign, that James had long before his 
accession been preparing for a struggle with the Houses, rather 
than for a policy of concession. During the Queen's reign, the 
power of Parliament had sprung mainly from the continuance of 
the war, and from the necessity under which the Crown lay of 
appealing to it for supplies. It is fair to the war party in Eliz- 
abeth's Council to remember that they were fighting, not merely 
for Protestantism abroad, but for constitutional liberty at home. 
When Essex overrode Burleigh's counsels of peace, the old minis- 
ter pointed to the words of tlie Bible — "a bloodthirsty man shall 
not live out half his days." But Essex and his friends had nobler 
motives for their policy of war than a thirst for blood ; as James 
had meaner motives for his policy of peace than a hatred of blood- 
shedding. The peace which he hastened to conclude with Spain 
was intended to free the Crown from its dependence on the Par- 
liament; and had he fallen back after the close of the war on 
Elizabeth's policy of economy, he might yet have succeeded in 
his aim. But the debt left by the war was only swollen by his 
profligate extravagance; and peace was hardly concluded when 
he was forced to appeal once more to his Parliament for supplies. 
The Parliament of IG04 met in another mood from that of any 
Parliament which had met for a hundred years. Short as had 
been the time since his accession, the temper of the King had al- 
ready disclosed itself; and men were dwelling ominously on the 
claims of absolutism in Church and State which were constantly 
on the Royal lips. Above all, the hopes of religious concessions 
to which the Puritans had clung had been dashed to the ground 



476 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



in the Hampton Court Conference; and of the squires and bur- 
gesses who made np the new House of Commons three fourths 
were in sympathy Puritan. The energy which marked their ac- 
tion from the beginning shows that the insults which James had 
heaped on the Puritan divines had stirred the temper of the na- 
tion at large. The first step of the Commons was to name a com- 
mittee to frame bills for the redress of the more crying ecclesias- 
tical grievances; and the rejection of the measures they proposed 
was at once followed by an outspoken address to the King. The 
Parliament, it said, had come together in a spirit of peace; "Our 
desire was of peace only, and our device of unity." Their aim 
had been to extinguish the long-standing dissension among the 
ministers, and to preserve uniformity by the abandonment of "a 
few ceremonies of small importance," by the redress of some ec- 
clesiastical abuses, and by the establishment of an efficient train- 
ing for a preaching clergy. If they had waived their right to 
deal with these matters during the old age of Elizabeth, they as- 
serted it now. "Let your Majesty be pleased to receive public 
information from your Commons in Parliament, as well of the 
abuses in the Church as in the Civil State and Government." 
The claim of absolutism was met in words which sound like a 
prelude to the Petition of Right. "Your Majesty would be mis- 
informed," said their address, "if any man should deliver that the 
Kings of England have any absolute power in themselves either 
to alter religion or to make any laws concerning the same, other- 
wise than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament." The 
address was met by a petulant scolding from James; and the 
bishops, secure of the support of the Crown, replied by an act of 
bold defiance. The Canons enacted in the Convocation of 1604 
bound the clergy to subscribe to the Three Articles, Avhich Par- 
liament had long before refused to render obligatory on them; 
and compelled all curates and lecturers to conform strictly to the 
rubrics of the Prayer-book on pain of deprivation. In the follow- 
ing winter three hundred of the Puritan clergy were driven from 
their livings for ijon-compliance with these requirements. The 
only help came from an unlooked-for quarter. The jealousy which 
had always prevailed between the civil and ecclesiastical courts 
united with the general resentment of the country at these ecclesi- 
astical usurpations to spur the Judges to an attack on the Hii^h 
Commission, By a series of decisions on appeal they limited its 
boundless jurisdiction, and restricted its powers of imprisonment 
to cases of schism and heresy. But the Judges \\ ere of little avail 
against the Crown; and James was resolute in his support of the 
bishops. Fortunately his prodigality had already in a few years 
of peace doubled the debt which Elizabeth had left after fifteen 
years of war; and the course of illegal taxation on which lie en- 
tered was far from supplying the deficit of the Exchequer. His 
first great constitutional innovation was the imposition of Customs 
duties on almost all kinds of merchandise, imported or exported. 
The imposition was not, indeed, without precedent. A duty on 
imports which had been introduced in one or two instances under 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



4.r. 



Mary had been extended by Elizabeth to clothes and wine; but 
the impost, trivial in itself, had been jDUshed no farther, nor had 
it ever been claimed or regarded as more than an exceptional 
measure of finance. Had Elizabeth cared to extend it, her course 
>YOuld probably have been gradual and tentative, and have aimed 
at escaping public observation. But James was a fanatical be- 
liever in the rights and power of his crown, and he cared quite as 
much to assert his absolute authority over taxation as to fill his 
Treasury. A case therefore Avas brought before the Exchequer 
Chamber, and the judgment of the Court asserted the King's 
right to levy what Customs duties he would at his pleasure. 
"All customs," said the Judges, "are the effects of foreign com- 
merce, but all aifairs of commerce and treaties with foreign na- 
tions belong to the King's absolute power. He, therefore, who 
has power over the cause, must have power over the effect." The 
importance of a decision Avhich freed the Crown from the neces- 
sity of resorting to Parliament Avas seen keenly enough by James. 
English commerce was growing fast, and English merchants were 
fighting their wny to the Spice Islands, and establishing settle- 
ments in the dominions of the Mogul. The judgment gave him 
a revenue which was sure to grow rapidly, and he acted on it 
with decision. A Royal proclamation imposed a system of Cus- 
toms duties on all articles of export and import. But if the new 
duties came in fast, the Royal debt grew faster. The peace ex- 
penditure of James exceeded the war expenditure of Elizabeth, 
and necessity forced on the King a fresh assembling of Parliament. 
He forbade the Commons to enter on the subject of the new du- 
ties, but their remonstrance was none the less vigorous. "Find- 
ing that your Majesty without advice or counsel of Parliament 
hath lately in time of peace set both greater impositions and more 
in number than any of your noble ancestors did ever in time of 
war," they prayed "that all impositions set without the assent of 
Parliament may be quite abolished and taken away," and that "a 
law be made to declare that all impositions set upon your people, 
their goods or merchandise, save only by common consent in Par- 
liament, are and shall be void." From the new question of illegal 
taxation they turned, with no less earnestness, to the older ques- 
tion of ecclesiastical reform. Before granting the supply Avhich 
the Crown required, they demanded that the jurisdiction of the 
High Commission should be regulated by Statute — in other Avords, 
that ecclesiastical matters should be recognized as Avithin the 
cognizance of Parliament; and that the deprived ministers should 
again be suffered to preach. Whatever concessions James might 
offer on the subject of the Customs, he would alloAV no interfer- 
ence Avith his ecclesiastical prerogative ; the Parliament Avas dis- 
solved, and four years passed before the financial straits of the 
Government forced James to face the tAvo Houses again. But 
the spirit of resistance Avas now fairly roused. Never had an 
election stirred so much popular passion as that of 1614. In 
every case Avhere rejection Avas possible, the Court candidates 
Avere rejected. All the leading members of the Country party — 



478 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



or, as we should call it now, the Opposition — were again returned. 
But three hundred of the members were wholly new men ; and 
among these we note for the first time the names of the great 
leaders in the later struggle with the Crown. Somersetshire re- 
turned Jolm Pym; Yorkshire, Thomas Wentworth; St. Germain's, 
John Eliot. Signs of an unprecedented excitement were seen in 
the vehement cheering and hissing which for the first time mark- 
ed the proceedings of the Commons. But the policy of the Par- 
liament was precisely the srime as that of its predecessors. The 
Commons refused to grant supplies till grievances had been re- 
dressed, and fixed on that of illegal taxation as the first to be 
amended. Unluckily the inexperience of the bulk of the members 
led them into quarreling on a point of privilege with the Lords; 
and the King, who had been frightened beyond his wont at the 
vehemence of their tone and language, seized on the quarrel as a 
pretext for their dissolution. 

Four of the leading members in the dissolved Parliament were 
sent to the Tower; and the terror and resentment which it had 
roused in the King's mind were seen in the obstinacy with which 
he long persisted in governing without any Parliament at all. 
For seven years he carried out with a blind recklessness his the- 
ory of an absolute rule, unfettered by any scruples as to the past 
or any dread of the future. All the abuses which Parliament 
after Parliament had denounced were not only continued, but 
developed in a spirit of defiance. The Ecclesiastical Commission 
was liounded on to a fresh persecution. James had admitted the 
illegality of Royal proclamations, but he issued them now in 
greater numbers tlian ever. The refusal of supplies was met by 
persistence in the levy of Customs; and, when this proved insuffi- 
cient to meet the wants of the Treasury, by falling back on a re- 
source which even Wolsey in the height of the Tudor jDower had 
been forced to abandon. But the letters from the Royal Council 
demanding benevolences or loans from every landowner remained 
generally unanswered. In the three years which followed the 
dissolution of 1614 the strenuous efibrts of the Sheriffs only raised 
sixty thousand pounds, a sura less than two thirds of the value of 
a single subsidy; and although the remonstrances of the western 
counties were roughly silenced by the threats of the Council, two 
counties, those of Hereford and Stafford, sent not a penny to the 
last. In his distress for money James was driven to expedients 
which widened the breach between the gentry and the Crown. 
He had refused to part with the feudal privileges which had come 
down to him from the Middle Ages, such as his right to the ward- 
ship of young heirs and the marriage of heiresses, and these were 
now recklessly used as a means of fiscal extortion. He degraded 
the nobility by a shameless sale of peerages. Of the ninety lay 
peers whom he left in the Upper House at his death, nearly one 
half had been created by sheer bargaining during his reign. By 
shifts such as these James put off from day to day the necessity 
for again encountering the one body whicli could permanently 
arrest his effort after despotic rule. But there still remained a 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



479 



body whose tradition was strong enough, not indeed to arrest, 
but to check it. The lawyers had been subservient beyond all 
other classes to the Crown. In the narrow pedantry with which 
they bent before precedents, without admitting any distinction 
between precedents drawn from a time of freedom and precedents 
drawn from the worst times of tyranny, the Judges had support- 
ed James in his claims to impose Customs duties, and even to levy 
benevolences. But beyond precedents even the Judges refused 
to go. They had done their best, when the case came before 
thelii, to restrict the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts with- 
in legal and definite bounds; and when James asserted an inher- 
ent right in the King to be consulted as to the decision, when- 
ever any case affecting the prerogative came before his courts, 
they timidly, but firmly, repudiated such a right as unknown to 
the law. James sent for them to the Royal closet, and rated 
them like schoolboys, till they fell on their knees, and, with a 
single exception, pledged themselves to obey his will. The Chief 
Justice, Sir Edward Coke, a narrow-minded and bitter-tempered 
man, but of the highest eminence as a lawyer, and with a i-ever- 
ence for the law that overrode every other instinct, alone remain- 
ed firm. When any case came before him, he answered, he would 
act as it became a judge to act. The provision which then made 
the judicial office tenable at the King's pleasure, but Avhich had 
long been forgotten, was revived to humble the law in the person 
of its chief ofiicer; and Coke, who had at once been dismissed 
from the Council, was on the continuance of his resistance de- 
prived of his post of Chief Justice. No act of James seems to 
have stirred a deeper horror and resentment among Englishmen 
than this announcement of his will to tamper with the course of 
justice. It was an outrage on the growing sense of law, as the 
profusion and profligacy of the Court were an oiitrage on the 
growing sense of morality. The Treasury was drained to furnish 
masques and revels on a scale of unexampled splendor. Lands 
and jewels were lavished on young adventurers, whose fair foces 
caught the Royal fancy. The Court of Elizabeth had been as 
immoral as that of her successor, but its immorality had been 
shrouded by a veil of grace and chivalry. But no veil hid tlie 
degrading grossness of the Court of James. The King was known 
to be an habitual drunkard, and suspected of vices C()in])ared with 
which drunkenness was almost a virtue. Ladies of high rank 
copied the Royal manners, and rolled intoxicated in open Court 
at the King's feet. A scandalous trial showed great nobles and 
ofiicers of state in league with cheats and astrologers and poison- 
ers. James himself meddled with justice to obtain a shameful 
divorce for Lady Essex, the most profligate woman of her time; 
and her subsequent bridal with one of his favorites was celebrated 
in his presence. Before scenes such as these the half-idolatrous 
reverence with which the sovereign had been regarded through- 
out the period of the Tudors died away into abhorrence ancl con- 
tempt. The players openly mocked at the King on the stage. 
Mrs. Hutchinson denounces the orivies of Whitehall in words as 



480 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



fiery as those Avitli which Elijah denounced the sensuality of Jez- 
ebel. But the immorality of James's Court Avas hardly more des- 
picable than the imbecility of his government. In the silence of 
Parliament, the Royal Council, composed as it was not merely of 
the ministers, but of the higher nobles and great officers of state, 
had served even under a despot like Henry the Eighth as a check 
upon the purely arbitrary authority of the Crown, But after the 
death of Lord Burleigh's son, Robert Cecil, the minister whom 
Elizabeth had bequeathed to him, and whose services in procur- 
ing his accession were rewarded by the Earldom of Salisbury, all 
real control over afiiairs was withdrawn by James from the Coun-' 
oil, and intrusted to worthless favorites whom the King chose to. 
raise to honor. A Scotch page, named Carr, was created Earl of 
Rochester, married after her divorce to Lady Essex, and only 
hurled from favor and power by the discovery of a horrible crime, 
the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury by poison, of which he and 
his Countess were convicted of being the instigators. But the 
shame of one favorite only hurried James into the choice of an- 
other; and George Villiers, a handsome young adventurer, was 
raised rapidly through every rank of the peerage, made Marquis 
and Duke of Buckingham, and intrusted with the direction of 
English policy. The payment of bribes to him, or marriage with 
his greedy relatives, soon became the only road to political pre- 
ferment. Resistance to his will Avas inevitably followed by dis- 
missal from ofiice. Even the highest and most powerful of the 
nobility were made to tremble at the nod of this young upstart. 
"Never any man in any age, nor, I believe, in any country," says 
the astonished Clarendon, "rose in so short a time to so muc;h 
greatness of honor, power, or fortune, upon no other advantage 
or recommendation than of the beauty or gracefulness of his per- 
son." But the selfishness and recklessness of Buckingham were 
equal to his beautj''; and the haughty young favorite, on whose 
neck James loved to loll, and whose cheek he slobbered with kiss- 
es, was destined to drag down in his fatal career the throne of the 
Stuarts. 

The new system was even more disastrous in its results abroad 
than at home. The withdrawal of pov/er from the Council left 
James in effect his own prime minister, and master of the control 
of affairs as no English sovereign had been before him. At his 
accession he found the direction of foreign affairs in the hands of 
Cecil, and so long as Cecil lived the Elizabethan policy was in the 
main adhered to. Peace, indeed, was made with Spain ; but a 
close alliance with the United Provinces, and a close friendship 
with France, held the ambition of Spain as effectually in check as 
war. No sooner did signs of danger appear in Germany from the 
bigotry of the House of Austria, than the marriage of the King's 
daughter, Elizabeth, with the Elector-Palatine promised English 
support to its Protestant powers. It was, indeed, mainh' to the 
firm direction of English policy during Cecil's ministry that the 
preservation of peace throughout Europe was due. But the death 
of Cecil and the dissolution of the Parliament of 1614 were quickly 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



481 



followed by a disastrous change. James at once proceeded to 
undo all that the struggle of Elizabeth and the triumph of the 
Armada had done. He withdrew gradually from the close con- 
nection with France. He began a series of negotiations for the 
marriage of his son with a Princess of Spain, Each of his suc- 
cessive favorites supported the Spanish alliance ; and after years 
of secret intrigue the King's intentions were proclaimed to the 
world, at the moment when the religious truce which had so long 
preserved the peace of Germany was broken by the revolt of Bo- 
hemia against the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, who claimed its 
crown, and by its election of the Elector-Palatine to the vacant 
throne. From whatever quarter the first aggression had come, it 
was plain that a second great struggle in arms between Protest- 
antism and Catholicism was now to be fought out on German soil. 
It was their prescience of the coming conflict, and of the pitiful 
part which James would play in it, which, on the very eve of the 
crisis, spurred the Protestant party among his ministers to support 
an enterprise which promised to detach the King from his new 
policy by entangling him in a war with Spain. Sir Walter Raleigh, 
the one great name of the Elizabethan time that still lingered on, 
had been imprisoned ever since the beginning of the new reign in 
the Tower on a charge of treason. He now offered to sail to the 
Orinoco, and discover a gold mine which he believed to exist on 
its banks. Guiana was Spanish ground ; and the appeal to the 
King's cupidity was backed by the Protestant party with the pur- 
j)ose of bringing on, through Raleigh's, settlement there, a contest 
with Spain. But though he yielded to the popular feeling in suf- 
fering Raleigh to sail, James. had given previous warning of the 
voyage to his new ally; and the expedition had hardly landed 
when it was driven back w^th loss from the coast. Raleigh's at- 
tempt to seize the Spanish treasure-ships on his return, with the 
same aim of provoking a war, was defeated by a mutiny among 
his crews; and the death of the broken-hearted adventurer on 
the scaffold atoned for the affront to Spain. But the failure of 
Raleigh's efforts to anticipate the crisis quickened the anxiety of 
the people at large when the crisis arrived. The German Protest- 
ants were divided by the fatal jealousy between their Lutheran 
and Calvinist princes ; but it was believed that England could 
unite them, and it was on England's support that the Bohemians 
counted when they chose James's son-in-law for their king. A firm 
policy would at any rate have held Spain inactive, and limited the 
contest to Germany itself. But the "state-craft" on which James 
prided himself led him to count, not on Spanish fear, but on Span- 
ish friendship. He refused aid to the Protestant union of the 
German princes when they espoused the cause of Bohemia, and 
threatened war against Holland, the one power which was earnest 
in the Palatine's cause. It was in vain that both Court and people 
were unanimous in their cry for war ; that Archbishop Abbot from 
his sick-bed implored the King to strike one blow for Protestant- 
ism ; that Spain openly took part with the Catholic League, which 
liad now been formed under the Elector of Bavaria, and marched 

31 



482 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



an army upon the Rhine. James still pressed his son-in-law to 
withdraw from Bohemia, and counted on his influence with Spain 
to induce its armies to retire when once the Bohemian struggle 
was over. Bat a battle before the walls of Prague, which crushed 
the Bohemian revolt, drove Frederick back on the Rhine, to find 
the SjDaniards encamped as its masters in the heart of the Palati- 
nate. James had been duped, and for the moment he bent before 
the burst of popular fuiy which the danger to German Protestant- 
ism called up. A national subscription for the defense of the 
Palatinate enabled its Elector to raise an army ; and his army was 
joined by a force of English volunteers under Sir Horace Vere. 
The cry for a Parliament, the necessary prelude to a war, over- 
powered the King's secret resistance, and the warlike speech with 
which he opened its session roused an enthusiasm which recalled 
the da5'^s of Elizabeth. 

The Commons answered the King's appeal by a unanimous vote 
— "lifting their hats as high as they could hold them" — that for 
the recovery of the Palatinate they would adventure their for- 
tunes, their estates, and their lives. " Rather this declaration," 
cried a leader of the Country party when it was read by the 
Speaker, " than ten thousand men already on the march !" But it 
met with no corresponding pledge or announcement of policy from 
James; on the contrary, he gave license for the export of arms to 
Spain. As yet constitutional grievances had been passed by, but 
the Royal defiance roused the Commons to revive a Parliamentary 
right which had slept ever, since the reign of Edward the Third, 
the right of the Lower House to impeach great offenders at the 
bar of the Lords. The new weapon was put to a summary use. 
The most crying constitutional grievance s^^rang from the revival 
of monopolies, after the pledge of Elizabeth to suppress them; and 
the impeachment of a host of monopolists again put an end to this 
attempt to raise a revenue for the Crown without a grant from 
Parliament. But the blow at the corruption of the Court which 
followed was of a far more serious order. ISTot only was the Chan- 
cellor, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam and Earl of St. Albans, the 
most distinguished man of his time for learning and ability, but 
his high position as an ofiicer of the Crown made his impeachment 
for bribery a direct claim on the Parliament's part to supervise 
the Royal administration. James was too shrewd to mistake the 
importance of the step ; but the hostility of Buckingham to the 
Chancellor, and Bacon's own confession of his guilt, made it diffi- 
cult to resist his condemnation. Energetic, too, as its measures 
were, the Parliament respected scrupulously the King's prejudices 
in other matters; and even when checked by an adjournment, re- 
solved unanimously to support him in any earnest effort for the 
Protestant cause. For the moment its resolve gave vigor to the 
Royal policy. James had aimed throughout at the restitution of 
Bohemia to Ferdinand, and at inducing the Emperor, through the 
mediation of Spain, to abstain from any retaliation on the Palati- 
nate. He now freed himself for a moment from the trammels of 
diplomacy, and enfoi'ced a cessation of the attack on his son-in- 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



483 



law's dominions by a threat of war. The suspension of arms lasted 
through the summer ; but mere threats could do no more, and on 
the conquest of the Upper Palatinate at the close of the truce by 
the forces of the Catholic League, James suddenly returned to his 
old resolve to rely on negotiations, and on the friendly mediation 
of Spain. Gondomar, the Spanish embassador, who had become 
all-powerful at the English Court, was assured that no effectual 
aid should be sent to the Palatinate. The English fleet, which 
was cruising by way of menace off the Spanish coast, was called 
home. The King dismissed those of his ministers who still opposed 
a Spanish policy; and threatened on trivial pretexts a war with 
the Dutch, the one great Protestant power that remained in alli- 
ance with England, and was ready to back the Elector, But he 
had still to reckon with his Parliament ; and the first act of the 
Parliament on its re-assembling was to demand a declaration of 
war with Spain. The instinct of the nation was wiser than the 
state-craft of the King. Ruined and enfeebled as she really was, 
Spain to the world at large still seemed the champion of Catholi- 
cism. It was the entry of her troops into the Palatinate which 
had first widened the local war in Bohemia into a great struggle 
for the suppression of Protestantism along tli^JRhine ; above all it 
was Spanish influence, and the hopes held otit of/a marriag-e of his 
son with a Spanish Infanta, which were luring the King into his 
fatal dependence on the great enemy of the Protestant cause. In 
their petition the Houses coupled with their demands for war the 
demand of a Protestant marriage for their future Kin^. Experi- 
ence proved in later years how perilous it was for English freedom 
that the heir to the Crown should be brought up under a Catholic 
mother; but James was beside himself at their presumption in 
dealing with mysteries of State. "Bring stools for the Embassa- 
dors," he cried in bitter irony as the committee of the Commons 
appeared before him. He refused the petition, forbade any further 
discussion of State policy, and threatened the speakers with the 
Tower. " Let us resort to our prayers," a member said calmly as 
the King's letter was read, " and then consider of this great busi- 
ness." The temper of the Commons was seen in the Protestation 
which met the Poyal command to abstain from discussion. ^ The 
House resolved "That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and juris- 
dictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright 
and inheritance of the subjects of England; and that the arduous 
and urgent affairs concerning the King, State, and defense of the 
Realm, and of the Church of England, and the making and main- 
tenance of laws, and redress of grievances, which daily happen 
within this Realm, are proper subjects and matter of Council and 
debate in Parliament. And that in the handling and proceeding 
of those businesses every member of the House hath, and of right 
ought to have, freedom of speech to propound, treat, reason, and 
bring to conclusion the same." 

The King ansAvered the Protestation by a characteristic outrage. 
He sent for the Journals of the House, and with his own hand tore 
out the pages which contained it. "I will govern," he said, "ac- 



484 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



cording to the common weal, but not according to the common 
-will." A few days after he dissolved the Parliament. "It is the 
best thing that has happened in the interests of Spain and of the 
Catholic religion since Luther began preaching," wrote the Count 
of Gondoraar to his master, in his joy that all danger of war had 
passed away. " I am ready to depart," Sir Henry Saville, on the 
other hand, murmured on his death-bed, " the rather that having 
lived in good times I foresee worse." Abroad indeed all was lost ; 
and Germany plunged wildly and blindly forward into the chaos 
of the Thirty- Years' War. But for England the victory of free- 
dom Avas practically won. James had himself ruined the system 
of Elizabeth. In his desire for personal government he had de- 
stroyed the authority of the Council. He had accustomed men to 
think lightly of the gr^at ministers of the Crown, to see them brow- 
beaten by favorites, and driven from office for corruption. He 
had disenchanted his people of their blind faith in the Ci'own by a 
policy at home and abroad which ran counter to avery national 
instinct. He had quarreled with and insulted the Plouses as no 
English sovereign had ever done before ; and all the while he was 
conscious that the authority he boasted of was passing, without his 
being able to hinder it, to the Parliament which he outraged. 
There was shrewdness as well as anger in his taunt at its " embas- 
sadors." A power had at last risen up in the Commons with which 
the Monarchy was henceforth to reckon. In spite of the King's 
petulant outbreaks. Parliament had asserted and enforced its ex- 
clusive right to the control of taxation. It had suppressed monop- 
olies. It had reformed abuses in the courts of law. It had re- 
vived the right of impeaching and removing from office even the» 
highest ministers of the Crown. It had asserted its privileges of 
free discussion on all questions connected with the welfare of the 
realm. It had claimed to deal with the question of religion. It 
had even declared its will on the sacred "mystery" of foreign pol- 
icy. James might tear the Protestation from its Journals, but 
there were pages in the record of the Parliament of 1621 which he 
never could tear out. 



Section III.— Tlie King and tSic Parliament, 1623—1629. 

^Authorities. — For the first part of this period we have still Mr. Gardiner's "Span- 
ish Marriage," a book which throws a full and fresh light on one of the most obscure 
times in our histoiy. From the accession of Charles we are overwhelmed by a host 
of modern authorities, among which Mr. Forster's "Life of Sir John Eliot " stands 
first in A-alue and interest for the years which it embraces. Among the general ac- 
counts of the reign of Charles, Mr. Disraeli's "Commentaries on the reign of Charles 
I." is the most prominent on the one side; Brodie's "History of the British Em- 
pire," and Godwin's "History of the Commonwealth," on the other. M. Guizot's 
work is accurate and impartial, and Lingard of especial value for the history of the 
English Catholics, and for his detail of foreign affairs. For the ecclesiastical side, 
see Laud's " Diary." The Commons' Journal gives the proceedings of the Parlia- 
ments. Throughout this, as throughout the earlier periods from the accession of 
Henry the Eighth, the Calendars of State Papers, now issuing under the direction 
of the Master of the Bolls, are of the greatest historic value.] 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



4S5 



In the obstinacy with which he clung to his Spanish policy, James 
stood absolutely alone ; for not only the old nobility and the states- 
men who jDreserved the tradition of the age of Elizabeth, but even 
his own ministers, with the exception of Buckingham, were at one 
with the Commons. The King's aim, as we have said, was to en- 
force peace on the combatants, and to bring about the restitution 
of the Palatinate to the Elector, through the influence of Spain. It 
was to secure this influence that he pressed for a closer union with 
the great Catholic power; and of this union, and the success of 
the policy which it embodied, the marriage of his son Charles with 
the Infanta, which had been held out as a lure to his vanity, was 
to be the sign. The more, however, James pressed for this con- 
summation of his projects, the more Spain held back ; but so bent 
was the King on its realization that, after fruitless negotiations, the 
Prince quitted England in disguise, and appeared with Bucking- 
ham at Madrid to claim his promised bride. It was in vain that 
the Spanish Court rose in its demands ; for every new demand was 
met by fresh concessions on the part of England. The abrogation 
of the penal laws against the Catholics, a Catholic education for 
the Prince's children, a Catholic household for the Infanta, all were 
no sooner a^ked than they were granted. But the marriage was 
still delayed, while the influence of the new i3olicy on the war in 
Germany was hard to see. The Catholic League, and its army un- 
der the command of Count Tilly, won triumph after triumph over 
their divided foes. The reduction of Heidelberg and Mannheim 
completed the conquest of the Palatinate, whose Elector fled help- 
lessly to Holland, while his Electoral dignity was transferred by 
the Emperor to the Duke of Bavaria. But there was still no sign 
of the hoped-for intervention on the part of Spain. At last the 
pressure of Charles himself brought about the disclosure of the se- 
cret of its policy. "It is a maxim of state with ns," the Duke of 
Olivarez confessed, as the Prince demanded an energetic interfer- 
ence in Germany, " that the King of Spain must never fight against 
the Emperor. We can not employ our forces against the Emper- 
or." " If you hold to that," replied the Prince,"" there is an end 
of all." 

His return was the signal for a burst of national joy. All Lon- 
don was alight with bonfires, in her joy at the failure of the Span- 
ish match, and of the collapse, humiliating as it was, of the policy 
which had so long trailed English honor at the chariot-wheels of 
Spain. Charles returned with the fixed resolve to take the direc- 
tion of affairs out of his father's hands. The journey to Madrid 
had revealed to those around him the strange mixture of obstinacy 
and weakness in the Prince's character, the duplicity which lavish- 
ed promises because it never purposed to be bound by any, the 
petty pride that subordinated every political consideration to per- 
sonal vanity or personal pique. He had granted demand after de- 
mand, till the very Spaniards lost faith in his concessions. With 
rage in his heart at the failure of his efibrts, he had renewed his 
betrothal on the very eve of his departure, only that he might in- 
sult the Infanta by its withdrawal when he was safe at home. 



486 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



But to England at large the basei* features of his character were 
still unknown. The stately reserve, the personal dignity and de- 
cency of manners which distinguished the Prince, contrasted favor- 
ably with the gabble and indecorum of his father. The courtiers in- 
deed who saw him in his youth would often pray God that " he might 
be in the right way when he set ; for if he was in tlie wrong he would 
prove the most willful of any king that ever reigned." But the 
nation was willing to take his obstinacy for firmness ; as it took 
the pique which inspired his course on his return for patriotism 
and for the promise of a nobler rule. His first acts were energetic 
enough. The King was forced to summon a Parliament, and to 
concede the point on which he had broken with the last, by laying 
before it the whole question of the Spanish negotiations. Buck- 
ingham and the Prince personally joined the Parliament in its de- 
mand for a rupture of the treaties and a declaration of war, A 
subsidy was eagerly voted; the persecution of the Catholics, 
which had long been suspended out of deference to Spanish inter- 
vention, recommenced with vigor. The head of the Spanish party 
in tlie ministry, Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, the Lord Treasurer, 
was impeached on a charge of corruption, and dismissed from office. 
James was swept along heljilessly by the tide ; but, helpless as he 
was, his shrewdness saw clearly enough the turn that things were 
really taking. " You are making a rod for your own back," he 
said to Buckingham, wlien his favorite pressed him to consent to 
Cranfield's disgrace. But Charles and Buckingham were still res- 
olute in their jDroject of war. The Spanish embassador quitted the 
realm ; a treaty of alliance was concluded with Holland ; negotia- 
tions were begun with the Lutheran Princes of North Germany^ 
who had looked coolly on at the ruin of the Calvinistic Elector-Pal- 
atine ; and the marriage of Charles with Henrietta, a daughter of 
Henry the Fourth of France, and sister of its King, promised a re- 
newal of the system of Elizabeth. At this juncture the death of 
the old King placed Charles upon the throne; and his first Parlia- 
ment met him in a passion of loyalty. " We can hope every thing 
from the King who now governs us," cried one of the leading pa- 
triots of the Commons. But there were cooler heads in the Com- 
mons than Sir Benjamin Rudyard's ; and, loyal as the Parliament 
was, enough had taken place in tlie short interval between the ac- 
cession of the new monarch and its assembling to temper its loy- 
alty with caution. 

The Avar with Spain, it must be remembered, meant to common 
Englishmen a war with Catholicism; and the fervor against Pop- 
ery without roused a corresponding fervor against Popery within 
the realm. Every Papist seemed to Protestant eyes an enemy at 
home. A Churchman who leaned to Popery was a traitor in the 
ranks. The temper of the Commons on these points was clear to 
every observer. " Whatever mention does break forth of the fears 
or dangers in religion, and the increase of Popery," wrote a mem- 
ber who was noting the proceedings of the House, " their affec- 
tions are much stirred." But Charles had already renewed the tol- 
eration of the Catholics, and warned the House to leave priest and 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



487 



recusant to the discretion of the Crown. It was soon plain that 
his ecclesiastical policy would be even more hostile to the Puri- 
tans than that of his father had been. Bishop Laud was put prac- 
tically at the head of ecclesiastical affairs, and Laud had at once 
drawn up a list of ministers divided ominously into " orthodox " 
and "Puritan." Tlie most notorious among the High Church di- 
vines, Doctor Montagu, advocated in his sermons the Divine right 
of Kings and the Real Presence, besides slighting the Protestant 
Churches of the Continent in favor of the Church of Rome. The 
first act of the Commons was to summon Montagu to their bar, 
and to commit him to the Tower. But there were other grounds 
for their distrust besides the King's ecclesiastical tendency. The 
subsidy of the last Parliament had been wasted, yet Charles still 
refused to declare with what power England was at war, or to 
avow that the great fleet be was manning was destined to act 
against Spain. The real part which he had played in the marriage 
negotiations had gradually been revealed, and the discovery had 
destroyed all faith in his Protestant enthusiasm. His reserve 
therefore was met by a corresponding caution. While voting a 
subsidy, the Commons restricted their grant of certain Customs 
duties, which had commonly been granted to the new sovereign 
for life, to a single year. The restriction was taken as an insult ; 
Charles refused to accept the grant, and Buckingham resolved to 
break with the Parliament at any cost. He suddenly demanded a 
new subsidy, a demand made merely to be denied, and which died 
Avithout debate. But the denial increased the King's irritation, and 
he marked it by drawing Montagu from the Tower, by promoting 
him to a Royal chaplaincy, and by levying the disputed customs 
on his own authority. The Houses met at Oxford in a sterner tem- 
per. "England," cried Sir Robert Philips, "is the last monarchy 
that yet retains her liberties. Let them not perish now !" But 
the Commons had no sooner announced their resolve to consider 
public grievances before entering on other business than they were 
met by a dissolution. Buckingham, who was more powerful with 
Charles than he had been Avith. his father, had resolved to lure En- 
gland from her constitutional struggle by a great military triumph ; 
and staking every thing on success, he sailed for the Hague to con- 
clude a general alliance against the House of Austria, while a fleet 
of ninety vessels and ten thousand soldiers left Plymouth for the 
coast of Spain. But if the projects of Charles were bolder than 
those of his predecessor, his execution of them was just as incaj)a- 
ble. The alliance broke utterly down. After an idle descent on 
Cadiz the Spanish expedition returned, broken with mutiny and 
disease. The enormous debt which had been incurred in its equip- 
ment forced the favorite to advise a new summons of the Plouses ; 
but he was keenly alive to the peril in which his failure had plunged 
him, and to a coalition which had been formed between his rivals 
at Court and the leaders of the last Parliament. His reckless dar- 
ing led him to an ticipate the danger, and by a series of blows to 
strike terror into liis opponents. Lord Pembroke was forced to a 
humiliating submission ; Lord Arundel was sent to the Tower. Sir 



488 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Thomas Wentwortb, Cope, and four other leading patriots, were 
made Sheriffs of their counties, and thns prevented from sitting in 
the coming Parliament. But their exclusion only left the field free 
for a more terrible foe. 

If Hampden and Pym are the great figures which embody the 
later national resistance, the earlier struggle for Parliamentary 
liberty centres in the figure of Sir John Eliot. Of an old family 
— ennobled since his time — which had settled under Elizabeth near 
the fishing -hamlet of St. Germain's, and whose stately mansion 
gives its name of Port Eliot to a little town on the Tamar, he had 
risen to the post of Vice-Admiral of Devonshire under the i:)ati'on- 
age of Buckingham, and had seen his activity in the suppression of 
piracy in the Channel rewarded by an unjust imprisonment. He 
was now in the first vigor of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cul- 
tivated, and familiar with the poetry and learning of his day ; a nat- 
ure singularly lofty and devout, a fearless and vehement temper. 
There was a hot impulsive element in his nature which showed it- 
self in youth in his drawing sword on a neighbor Avho denounced 
him to his father, and which in later years gave its characteristic 
fire to his eloquence. But his intellect was as clear and cool as 
his temper was ardent. In the general enthusiasm Avhich followed 
on the failure of the Spanish Marriage, he had stood almost alone 
hi pressing for a recognition of the rights of Parliament, as a pre- 
liminary to any real reconciliation with the Crown. He fixed, from 
the very outset of his career, on the responsibility of the Royal min- 
isters to Parliament, as the one critical point for English liberty. It 
was to enforce the demand of this that he availed himself of IBuck- 
ingham's sacrifice of the Treasurer, Cranfield, to the resentment of' 
the Commons. "The greater the delinquent," he urged, "the great- 
er the delict. They are a happy thing, great men and officers, if 
they be good, and one of the greatest blessings of the land ; but 
power converted into evil is the greatest curse that can befall it." 
I3ut the new Parliament had hardly met, when he came to the 
front to threaten a greater criminal than Cranfield. So menaciniic 
were his words, as he called for an inquiry into the failure before 
Cadiz, that Charles himself stooped to answer threat with threat. 
" I see," he wrote to the House, " you especially aim at the Duke 
of Buckingham. I must let you know that I will not allow any 
of my servants to be questioned among you, much less such as are 
of eminent place and near to me." A more direct attack on a right 
already acknowledged in the impeachment of Bacon and Cranfield 
could hardly be imagined, but Eliot refused to move from his con- 
stitutional ground. The King was by law irresponsible — he " could 
do no wrong." If the country therefore were to be saved from a 
pure despotism, it must be by enforcing the responsibility of the 
ministers who counseled and executed his acts. Eliot persisted 
in denouncing Buckingham's incompetence and corruption, and 
theCommons ordered the subsidy which the Crown had demand- 
ed to be brought in "when we shall have presented our griev- 
ances, and received his Majestj^'s answer thereto." Charles sum- 
moned them to Whitehall, and commanded them to cancel the 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



489 



condition. He would grant them " liberty of counsel, but not of 
control;" and he closed the interview with a significant threat. 
" Remember," he said, " the Parliaments are altogether in my pow- 
er for their calling, sitting, and dissolution ; and, therefore, as I 
find the fruits of them to be good or evil, tliey are to continue or 
not to be." But the will of the Commons was as resolute as tlie 
will of the King. Buckingham's impeachment was voted and car- 
ried to the Lords. The favorite took his seat as a peer to listen 
to the charge with so insolent an air of contempt that one of the 
managers appointed by the Commons to conduct it turned sharjj- 
ly on him. " Do you jeer, my Lord !" said Sir Dudley Digges. 
" I can show you when a greater man than your Lordship — as 
high as you in place and power, and as deep in the King's favor — 
has been hanged for as small a crime as these articles contain." 
The " proud carriage " of the Duke provoked an invective from 
Eliot which marks a new era in Parliamentary speech. From the 
first the vehemence and passion of his words had contrasted with 
the grave, colorless reasoning of older speakers. His opponents 
complained that Eliot aimed to " stir up affections." The quick 
emphatic sentences he substituted for the cumbrous periods of the 
day, his rapid argument, his vivacious and caustic allusions, his 
passionate appeals, his fearless invective, struck a new note in En- 
glish eloquence. The frivolous ostentation of Buckingham, his 
very figure blazing with jewels and gold, gave, point to the fierce 
attack. " He has broken those nerves and sinews of our land, the 
stores and treasures of the King. There needs no search for it. 
It is too visible. His profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his 
magnificent buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are they but the 
visible evidences of an express exhausting of the State, a chronicle 
of the immensity of his Avaste of the revenues of the Crown?" 
With the same terrible directness Eliot reviewed the Duke's greed 
and corruption, his insatiate ambition, his seizure of all public au- 
thority, his neglect of every public duty, his abuse for selfish ends 
of the powers he had accumulated. " The pleasure of his Majesty, 
his known directions, his public acts, his acts of council, the decrees 
of courts — all must be made inferior to this man's will, No right, 
no interest may withstand him. Through the power of the State 
and justice he has dared ever to strike at his own ends." "My 
Lords," he ended, after a vivid parallel between Buckingham and 
Sejanus, " you see the man ! What have been his actions, what he 
is like, you know ! I leave him to your judgment. This only is 
conceived by us, the knights, citizens, and burgesses of the Com- 
mons House of Parliament, that by him came all our evils, in him 
we find the causes, and on him must be the remedies ! Pereat qui 
perdere cuncta festinat. Opprimatur ne omnes opprimat !" 

The reply of Charles was as fierce and sudden as the attack of 
Eliot. He hurried to the House of Peers to avow as his own the 
deeds with which Buckingham was charged. Eliot and Digges 
were called from their seats, and committed prisoners to the Tower. 
The Commons, however, refused to proceed Avith public business 
till their members were restored ; and after a ten-days' struggle 



490 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Eliot was released. But his release was only a prelude to the 
close of' the Parliament. " Not one moment," the King replied to 
the prayer of his Council for delay ; and the final remonstrance in 
which the Commons begged him to dismiss Buckingham from his 
service forever was met by their instant dissolution. The remon- 
strance was burned by Royal order, Eliot was deprived of his Vice- 
Admiralty, and the subsidies which the Parliament had refused to 
grant till their grievances were i-edressed were levied in the arbi- 
trary form of benevolences. But the tide of public resistance was 
slowly rising. Refusals to give any thing, " save by way of Par- 
liament," came in from county after county. The arguments of 
the judges, who summoned tlae subsidy -men of Middlesex and 
Westminster to persuade them to comply, were met by the crowd 
with a tumultuous cry of "a Parliament! a Parliament! else no 
subsidies !" Kent stood out to a man. In Bucks the verj^ justices 
neglected to ask for the "free gift." The freeholders of Cornwall 
only answered that, "if they had but two kine, they would sell 
one of them for supply to his Majesty — in a Parliamentary way." 
The failure of the voluntary benevolence was met by the levy of 
a forced loan. Commissioners were named to assess the amount 
which every landowner was bound to lend, and to examine on oath 
all who refused. Every means of persuasion, as of force, was re- 
sorted to. The High Church pulpits resounded with the cry of 
" passive obedience." Dr. Mainwaring preached before Charles 
himself that tlie King needed no Parliamentary warrant for taxa- 
tion, and tliat to resist his will was to incur eternal damnation. 
Soldiers were quartered on recalcitrant boroughs. Poor men who 
refused to lend were pressed into the army or navy. Stubboi'n 
tradesmen were flung into prison. Buckingham himself undertook 
the task of overawing the nobles and the gentry. Among the 
bishops, the Primate and Bishop Williams, of Lincoln, alone resist- 
ed the King's will. The first was susjoended on a frivolous pretext, 
and the second sent to the Tower, But in the country at large 
resistance was universal. The northern counties in a mass set the 
Crown at defiance. The Lincolnshire farmers drove the Commis- 
sioners from the town, Shrojjshire, Devon, and Warwickshire " re- 
fused utterly." Eight peers, with Lord Essex and Lord Warwick 
at their head, declined to comply with the exaction as illegal. 
Two hundred countiy gentlemen, whose obstinacy had not been 
subdued by their transfer from prison to pi'ison, were summoned 
before the Council. John Hampden, as yet only a young Bucking- 
hamshire squire, appeared at the board to begin that career of pa- 
triotism which has made his name dear to Englishmen, "I could 
be content to lend," he said, " but fear to draw on myself that 
cursfi in Magna Charta, which should be read twice a year against 
those who infringe it," So close an imprisonment in the Gate 
House rewarded his protest "that he never afterward did look 
like the same man he was before." With gathering discontent as 
well as bankruptcy before him, nothing, could save the Duke but 
a great military success ; and he equipped a force of seven thou- 
sand men for the maddest and most profligate of all his enter- 



VIII. ] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



491 



prises. In the great struggle with Catholicism the hopes of every 
Protestant rested on the union of England with France against 
the House of Austria. From causes never fully explained, but in 
which a personal jjique against the French minister, Cardinal Rich- 
elieu, mingled with the desire to win an easy popularity at home 
by supporting the French Huguenots, Buckingham at this junc- 
ture broke suddenly with France, sailed in person to the Isle of 
Rhe, and roused the great Huguenot city of Rochelle to revolt. 
The expedition was as disastrous as it Avas impolitic. After a 
useless siege of the castle of St. Martin, the English troops were 
forced to fall back along a narrow causeway to their ships ; and 
in the retreat two thousand fell, without the loss of a single man 
to their enemies. 

The first result of Buckingham's folly was the fall of Rochelle 
and the ruin of the Huguenot cause in France. Indirectly, as we 
have seen, it helped on the ruin of the cause of Protestantism in 
Germany. But in England it forced on Charles, overwhelmed as 
lie was with debt and shame, the summoning of a new Parlia- 
ment ; a Parliament which met in a mood even more resolute 
than the last. The Court candidates were every where rejected. 
The patriot leaders Avere triumphantly returned. To have suf- 
fered in the recent resistance to arbitrary taxation was the sure 
road to a seat. In spite of Eliot's counsel, all other grievances, 
even that of Buckingham himself, gave place to the craving for 
redress of wrongs done to personal liberty. " We must vindicate 
our ancient liberties," said Sir Thomas Wentworth, in words soon 
to be remembered against himself; "we must reinforce the laws 
made by our ancestors. We must set such a stamp upon them 
as no licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to invade them." 
Heedless of sharp and menacing messages from the King, of de- 
mands that they should take his " Royal word " for their liberties, 
the House bent itself to one great work — the drawing up a Peti- 
tion of Right. The statutes that protected the subject against 
arbitrary taxation, against loans and benevolences, against pun- 
ishment, outlawry, or deprivation of goods, otherwise than by law- 
ful judgment of his peers, against arbitrary imprisonment with- 
out stated charge, against billeting of soldiery on the peoijle or 
enactment of martial law in time of peace, were formally recited. 
The breaches of them under the last two sovereigns, and above 
all since the dissolution of the last Parliament, were recited as 
formally. At the close of this significant list, the Commons prayed 
" that no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, 
loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common con- 
sent by Act of Parliament. And that none be called to make 
answer, or to take such oaths, or to be confined or otherwise mo- 
lested, or disputed concerning the same, or for refusal thereof. 
And that no freeman may in such manner as is before mentioned 
be imprisoned or detained. And that your Majesty would be 
pleased to remove the said soldiers and mariners, and that your 
people may not be so burdened in time to come. And that the 
commissions for proceeding by martial law may be revoked and 



492 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



annullecl, and that hereafter no commissions of like nature may 
issue forth to any person or j)ersons whatsoever to be executed as 
aforesaid, lest by color of them any of your Majesty's subjects be 
destroyed and put to death, contrary to the laws and franchises 
of the land. All which they humbly pray of your most excellent 
Majesty, as their rights and liberties, according to the laws and 
statutes of the realm. And that your Majesty would also vouch- 
safe to declare that the awards, doings, and proceedings to the 
prejudice of your people in any of the premises shall not be 
drawn hereafter into consequence or example. And that your 
Majesty would be pleased graciously, for the further comfort and 
safety of your people, to declare your Royal will and pleasure 
that in the things aforesaid all your officers and ministers shall 
serve you according to the laws and statutes of this realm, as 
they tender the honor of your Majesty and the prosperity of the 
kingdom." It was in vain that the Lords desired to conciliate 
Charles by a reservation of his "sovereign power." "Our pe- 
tition," Pym quietly replied, "is for the laws of England, and this 
power seems to be another power distinct from the power of the 
law." The Lords yielded, but Charles gave an evasive reply; 
and the failure of the more moderate counsels for which his own 
had been set aside called Eliot again to the front. Li a speech 
of unprecedented boldness he moved the presentation to the King 
of a Remonstrance on the state of the realm. But at the moment 
when he again touched on Buckingham's removal as the prelim- 
inary of any real improvement, the Speaker of the House inter- 
posed. "There was a command laid on him," he said, "to inter- 
rupt any that should go about to lay an aspersion on the King's 
ministers." The breach of their privilege of free speech produced 
a scene in the Commons such as St. Stephen's had never witnessed 
before. Eliot sat abruptly down amid the solemn silence of the 
House. " Then appeared such a spectacle of passions," says a 
letter of the time, " as the like had seldom been seen in such an 
assembly : some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying 
of the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in con- 
fessing their sins and country's sins which drew these judgments 
upon us, some finding, as it were, fault with those that wept. 
There were above a hundred Aveeping eyes, many who offered 
to speak being interrupted and silenced by their own passions." 
Pym himself rose only to sit down choked with tears. At last 
Sir Edward Coke found words to blame himself for the timid 
counsels which had checked Eliot at the beginning of the Session, 
and to protest that "the author and source of all those miseries 
was the Duke of Buckingham." 

Shouts of assent greeted the resolution to insert the Duke's 
name in their Remonstrance. But the danger to his favorite 
overcame the King's obstinacy, and to avert it he suddenly of- 
fered to consent to the Petition of Right. His consent won a 
grant of subsidy from the Parliament, and such a ringing of bells 
and lighting of bonfires from the people "as were never seen but 
upon his Majesty's return from Spain." But, like all Charles's 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



493 



concessions, it now came too late to effect tlie end at which 
he aimed. The Commons persisted in presenting their Remon- 
strance. Charles received it coldly and ungraciously ; while 
Buckingham, who had stood defiantly at his master's side as he 
was denounced, fell on his knees to speak. " No, George !" said 
the King as he raised him ; and his demeanor gave emphatic 
proof that the Duke's favor remained undiminished. " We will 
perish together, George," he added at a later time, " if thou 
dost." No shadow of his doom, in fact, had fallen over the brill- 
iant favorite, when, after the prorogation of the Parliament, he 
set out to take command of a new expedition for the relief of 
Rochelle. But a lieutenant in the navy, John Felton, soured by 
neglect and wrongs, had found in the Remonstrance some fancied 
sanction for the revenge he plotted, and, mixing with the throng 
which crowded the hall at Portsmouth, he stabbed Buckingham 
to the heart. Charles flung himself on his bed in a passion of 
tears when the news reached him ; but outside the Court it M'as 
welcomed with a burst of joy. Young Oxford bachelors, grave 
London aldermen, vied with each other in drinking healths to 
Felton. " God bless thee, little David," cried an old woman, as 
the murderer passed manacled by; "the Lord comfort thee," 
shouted the crowd, as the Tower gates closed on him. The very 
crews of the Duke's armament at Portsmouth shouted to the 
King, as he witnessed their departure, a prayer that he would 
" spare John Felton, their sometime fellow-soldier." But what- 
ever national hopes the fall of Buckingham had aroused were 
quickly dispelled. Weston, a creature of the Duke, became Lord 
Treasurer, and his system remained unchanged. "Though our 
Achan is cut off," said Eliot, " the accui'sed thing remains." 

It seemed as if no act of Charles could widen the breach Avhich 
his reckless lawlessness had made between himself and his sub- 
jects. But there was one thing dearer to England than free 
speech in Parliament, than security for property, or even per- 
sonal liberty ; and that one thing was, in the phrase of the clay, 
" the Gospel." The gloom which at the outset of this reign we 
saw settling down on every Puritan heart had deepened with 
each succeeding year. The great struggle abroad had gone more 
and more against Protestantism, and at this moment the end of 
the cause seemed to have come. In Germany Lutheran and Cai- 
vinist alike lay at last beneath the heel of the Catholic House of 
Austria. The fall of Rochelle left the Huguenots of France at 
the feet of a Roman Cardinal. While England was thrilling 
with excitement at the thought that her own hour of deadly 
peril might come again, as it had come in the year of the Ar- 
mada, Charles raised Laud to the Bishopric of London, and in- 
trusted him with the direction of ecclesiastical affairs. To the 
excited Protestantism of the country, Laud, and the High Church- 
men whom he 'headed, seemed a danger more really formidable 
than the Popery which was making such mighty strides abroad. 
They were traitors at home, traitors to God and their country at 
once. Their aim was to draw the Church of England farther 



494 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



away from the Protestant Churches, and nearer to the Church 
which Protestants regarded as Babylon, They aped Roman cer- 
emonies. Cautiously and tentatively they were introducing Ro- 
man doctrine. But they had none of the sacerdotal independ- 
ence which Rome had at any rate preserved. They were abject 
in their dependence on the Crown. Their gratitude for the Royal 
protection which enabled them to defy the religious instincts of 
the realm showed itself in their erection of the most dangerous 
pretensions of the monarchy into religious dogmas. Their model, 
Bishop Andrewes, declared James to have been inspired by God. 
They preached passive obedience to the worst tyranny. They 
declared the person and goods of the subject to be at the King's 
absolute disposal. They turned religion into a systematic attack 
on English liberty. Up to this time, however, they had been lit- 
tle more than a knot of courtly parsons — for the mass of the 
clergy, like their flocks, were steady Puritans — but the well- 
known energy of Laud promised a speedy increase of their num- 
bers and their power. Sober men looked forward to a day when 
every pulpit would be ringing with exhortations to passive obedi- 
ence, with denunciations of Calvinism and apologies for Rome. 
Of all the members of the House of Commons Eliot was least 
fanatical in his natural bent, but the religious crisis swept away 
for the moment all other thoughts from his mind. "Danger 
enlarges itself in so great a measure," he wrote from the coun- 
try, " that nothing but Heaven shrouds us from despair." The 
House met in the same temper. The first business it called up 
was that of religion. " The Gospel," Eliot burst forth, " is that 
Truth in which this kingdom has been happy through a long and 
rare prosperity. This ground, therefore, let us lay for a founda- 
tion of our building, that that Truth, not with words, but with 
actions we will maintain !" " There is a ceremony," he went on, 
" used in the Eastern Chui'ches, of standing at the repetition of 
the Creed, to testify their purjoose to maintain it, not only witli 
their bodies upright, but Avith their swords drawn. Give me 
leave to call that a custom very commendable !" The Commons 
answered their leader's challenge by a solemn vow. They avow- 
ed that they held for truth that sense of the Articles as estab- 
lished by Parliament, which by the public act of the Church, and 
the general and current exposition of the writers of their Church, 
had been delivered unto them. But the debates over religion 
were suddenly interrupted. The Commons, who had deferred all 
grant of customs till the Avrong done in the illegal levy of them 
was redressed, had summoned the farmers of those dues to the 
bar; but though they appeared, they pleaded the King's com- 
mand as a ground for their refusal to answer. The House was 
proceeding to a j^rotest, when the Speaker signified that he had 
received a Royal order to adjourn. Dissolution was clearly at 
hand, and the long-suppressed indignation broke 5ut in a scene 
of strange disorder. The Speaker was held down in the chair, 
while Eliot, still clinging to his great principle of ministerial re- 
sponsibility, denounced the new Treasurer as the adviser of the 



VIll.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



495 



measure. "None have gone about to break Parliaments," he 
added, in words to which after events gave a terrible significance, 
"but in the end Parliaments have broken them." The doors 
were locked, and in spite of the Speaker's protests, of the re- 
peated knocking of the usher sent by Charles to summon the 
Commons to his presence in the Lords' chamber, and of the gath- 
ering tumult within the House itself, the loud " Aye, Aye " of 
the "bulk of the members supported Eliot in his last vindication 
of English liberty. By successive resolutions the Commons de- 
clared whosoever should bring in innovations in religion, or what- 
ever minister advised the levy of subsidies not granted in Parlia- 
ment, "a capital enemy to the Kingdom and Commonwealth," 
and every subject voluntarily complying with illegal acts and de- 
mands " a betrayer of the liberty of England, and an enemy of 
the same." 

Section SV.— New England. 

{Authorities. — The admirable account of American colonization given by Mr. 
Bancroft ("History of the United States ") may be corrected in some points of de- 
tail by Mr. Gardiner's "History of England" (cap. vi.) and "Spanish Marriage" 
(cap. xliii.). For Laud himself, see his remarkable "Diary." His work at Lam- 
beth is described inPrynne's scurrilous "Canterbury's Doom." 



The dissolution of the Parliament of 1629 rnarked the darkest 
hour of Protestantism, whether in England or in the world at 
large. But it was in this hour of despair that the Puritans won 
their noblest triumph. They "turned," to use Canning's words 
in a far truer and grander sense than that which he gave to them — 
they " turned to the New World to redress the balance of the Old." 
It was during the years of tyranny which followed the close of 
the third Parliament of Charles that the great Puritan emigration 
founded the States of New England. 

The Puritans were far from being the earliest among the En- 
glish colonists of North America. There was little in the circum- 
stances which attended the first discovery of the Western world 
which promised well for freedom ; its earliest result, indeed, was 
to give an enormous impulse to the most bigoted and tyrannical 
of the Continental powers, and to pour the wealth of Mexico and 
Peru into the treasury of Spain. But while the Spanish galleons 
traversed the Southern seas, and Spanish settlers claimed the south- 
ern part of the great continent for the Catholic crown, the truer 
instinct of Englishmen drew them to the ruder and more barren 
districts along the shore of Northern America. Long before the 
time of Columbus the fisheries of the North Sea had made the 
merchants of Bristol familiar with the coasts of Greenland ; and 
two years before the great navigator reached the actual mainland 
of America, a Venetian merchant, John Cabot, who dwelt at Bris- 
tol, had landed with a crew of English sailors among the icy soli- 
tudes of Labrador. A year later his son, Sebastian Cabot, sailing 
from the same English port to the same point on the American 

32 



496 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



coast, pushed south as far as Maryland, and north as high as Hud- 
son's Bay. For a long time, however, no one followed in the track 
of these bold adventurers. While France settled its Canadian 
colonists along the St. Lawrence, and Spain — already mistress of 
the South — extended its dominions as far northward as Florida, 
the attention of Englishmen limited itself to the fisheries of New- 
foundland. It was only in the reign of Elizabeth that men's 
thoughts turned again to the discoveries of Cabot. Frobisher, in 
a vessel no larger than a man-of-war's barge, made his way to the 
coast of Labrador ; and the false news which he brought back of 
the existence of gold mines there drew adventurer after advent- 
urer among the icebergs of Hudson's Straits. Luckily the quest 
of gold proved a vain one; and the nobler spirits among those 
who had engaged in it turned to jDlans of colonization. But the 
countrj^, vexed by long winters and thinly peopled by warlike 
tribes of Lidians, gave a rough welcome to the earlier colonists. 
After a fruitless attempt to form a settlement. Sir Humphry Gil- 
bert, one of the noblest spirits of his time, tui'ned homeward again, 
to find his fate in the stormy seas. " We are as near to Heaven 
by sea as by land," Avere the famous words he was heard to utter, 
ere the light of his little bark was lost forever in the darkness of 
the night. An expedition sent by his brother-in-law, Sir Walter 
Raleigh, explored Pamlico Sound ; and the country they discov- 
ered — a country where, in their poetic fancy, " men lived after the 
manner of the Golden Age" — received from Elizabeth, the Virgin 
Queen, the name of Virginia. The introduction of tobacco and of 
the potato into Europe dates from Raleigh's discovery; but the 
energy of his settlers was distracted by the delusive dream of 
gold, the hostility of the native tribes drove them from the coast, 
and it is through the gratitude of later times for what he strove 
to do, rather than for what he did, that Raleigh, the capital of 
North Carolina, preserves his name. The first permanent settle- 
ment on the Chesapeake w^as effected in the beginning of the reign 
of James the First, and its success was due to the conviction of 
the settlers that the secret of the New World's conquest lay sim- 
ply in labor. Among the hundred and five colonists who origi- 
nally landed, forty-eight were gentlemen, and only twelve were 
tillers of the soil. Their leader, John Smith, however, not only 
explored the vast bay of Chesapeake and discovered the Potomac 
and the Susquehanna, but held the little company together in the 
face of famine and desertion till the colonists had learned the les- 
son of toil. In his letter to the colonizers at home he set resolute- 
ly aside the dream of gold. "Nothing is to be expected thence," 
he wrote of the new country, " but by labor;" and supplies of la- 
borers, aided by a wise allotment of lands to each colonist, secured 
after five years of struggle the fortunes of Virginia. "Men fell to 
building houses and planting corn ;" the very streets of James- 
town, as their capital was called from the reigning sovereign, were 
sown with tobacco; and in fifteen years the colony numbered five 
thousand souls. 

The laws and representative institutions of England were first 



vriL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



497 



introduced into the New World in the settlement of Virginia : ten 
years later a principle as unknown to England as it was to the 
greater part of Europe found its home in a second colony, which 
received its name of Maryland from Henrietta Maria, the queen of 
Charles the First. Calvert, Lord Baltimore, one of the best of the 
Stuart counselors, was forced by his conversion to Catholicism to 
seek a shelter for himself and colonists of his new faith in the dis- 
trict across the Potomac, and around the head of the Chesapeake. 
As a purely Catholic settlement was impossible, he resolved to 
open the new colony to men of every faith. "No person within 
this province," ran the earliest law of Maryland, " professing to 
believe in Jesus Christ, shall be in any ways troubled, molested, 
or discountenanced for his or her religion, or in the free exercise 
thereof." Long, however, before Lord Baltimore's settlement in 
Maryland, only a few years indeed after the settlement of Smith 
in Virginia, the little church of Brownist or Lidependent refugees, 
whom we saw driven in Elizabeth's reign to Rotterdam, had re- 
solved to quit Holland and find a home in the wilds of the New 
World. They were little disheartened by the tidings of suffering 
which came from the Virginian settlement. "We are well wean- 
ed," wrote their minister, John Robinson, "from the delicate milk 
of the mother-country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange 
land: the people are industrious and frugal. We are knit togeth- 
er as a body in a most sacred covenant of the Lord, of the violation 
whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold 
ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other's good and of the 
whole. It is not with ns as with men whom small things can dis- 
courage." Returning from Holland to Southampton, they started 
in two small vessels for the new land; but one of these soon put 
back, and only its companion, the Mayflower^ a bark of a hundred 
and eighty tons, with forty-one emigrants and their families on 
board, persisted in prosecuting its voyage. The little company 
of the "Pilgrim Fathers," as after-times loved to call them, landed 
on the barren coast of Massachusetts at a spot to which they gave 
the name of Plymouth, in memory of the last English port at which 
they touched. They had soon to face the long, hard winter of the 
North, to bear sickness and famine: even when these years of toil 
and suffering had passed, there was a time when " they knew not 
at night where to have a bit in the morning." Resolute and in- 
dustrious as they were, their progress was very slow; and at the 
end of ten yeai's they numbered only three hundred souls. But 
small as it was, the colony was now firmly established, and the 
struggle for mere existence was over. "Let it not be grievous 
nnto you," some of their brethren had written from England to 
the poor emigrants in the midst of their sufferings, "that you have 
been instrumental to break the ice for others. The honor shall 
be yours to the world's end." 

From the moment of their establishment the eyes of the English 
Puritans were fixed on the little Puritan settlement in North 
America. The sanction of the Crown was necessary to raise it 
into a colony; and the aid which the merchants of Boston, in Lin- 



498 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



colnsbire, gave to the realization of this project was acknowledged 
in the name of its capital. Eight days before announcing his re- 
solve to govern henceforth without Parliaments, Charles granted 
the charter which established the colony of Massachusetts ; and by 
the Puritans at large the grant was at once regarded as a Pi'ovi- 
dential call. Out of the failure of their great constitutional strug- 
gle, and the pressing danger to " godliness " in England, rose the 
dream of a laud in the West where religion and liberty could find 
a safe and lasting home. The third Parliament of Charles was 
hardly dissolved, when "conclusions" for the establishment of a 
great colony on the other side the Atlantic were circulating among 
gentry and traders, and descriptions of the new country of Massa- 
chusetts were talked over in every Puritan household. The pro- 
posal was welcomed with the quiet, stern enthusiasm which marked 
the temper of the time ; but the words of a well-known minister 
show how hard it was even for the sternest enthusiasts to tear 
themselves fi-oni their native land. "I shall call that iny coun- 
try," said John Winthrop, in answer to feelings of this sort, 
"where I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my 
dearest friends." The answer was accepted, and the Puritan emi- 
gration began on a scale such as England had never before seen. 
The two hundred who first sailed for Salem Avere soon followed by 
Winthrop himself with eight hundred men ; and seven hundred 
more followed ere the first year of the Royal tyranny had run 
its course. Nor were the emigrants, like the earlier colonists of 
the South, " broken men," adventurers, bankrupts, criminals ; or 
simply poor men and artisans, like the Pilgrim Fathers of the 
Mayflower. They were in great part men of the professional an4 
middle classes; some of them men of large landed estate, some 
zealous clergymen like Cotton, Hooker, and Roger Williams, some 
shrewd London lawyers or young scholars from Oxford. The 
bulk were god-fearing farmers from Lincolnshire and the eastern 
counties. They desired, in fact, "only the best" as sharers in their 
enterprise ; men driven forth from their fatherland not by earthly 
want, or by the greed of gold, or by the lust of adventure, but by 
the fear of God, and the zeal for a godly worship. But strong as 
was their zeal, it was not without a wrench that they tore them- 
selves from their English homes. " Farewell, dear England !" was 
the cry which burst from the first little company of emigrants as 
its shores faded from their sight. " Our hearts," wrote Winthrop's 
followers to the brethren whom they had left behind, "shall be 
fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare, when we shall bo 
in our poor cottages in the wilderness." 

During the next two years, as the sudden terror which had 
found so violent an outlet in Eliot's warnings died for the mo- 
ment away, there was a lull in the emigration. But the measures 
of Laud soon revived the panic of the Puritans. The shrewdness 
of James had read the very heart of the man, when Buckingham 
pressed for his first advancement to the see of St. Asaph. "He 
hath a restless spirit," said the old King, " which can not see when 
things are well, but loves to toss and change, and to bring matters 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



499 



to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain. Take him 
Avith you, but by my soul you will repent it." Cold, pedantic, ri- 
diculous, superstitious as he Avas (he notes in his diary the entry 
of a robin-redbreast into his study as a matter of grave moment), 
William Laud rose out of the mass of court-prelates by his indus- 
try, his personal unselfishness, his remarkable capacity for -admin- 
istration. At a later period, when immersed in State business, he 
found time to acquire so complete a knowledge of commercial af- 
fairs that the London merchants themselves owned him a master 
in matters of trade. But his real influence was derived from the 
unity of his purpose. He directed all the power of a clear, narrow 
mind and a dogged will to the realization of a single aim. His 
resolve was to raise the Church of England to what he conceived 
to be its real position as a branch, though a reformed branch, of 
the great Catholic Church throughout the world; protesting alike 
against the innovations of Rome and the innovations of Calvin, 
aiid basing its doctrines and usages on those of the Christian com- 
munion in the centuries which preceded the Council of Nicsea. 
The first step in the realization of such a theory was the severance 
of whatever ties had hitherto united the English Church to the 
Reformed Churches of the Continent. In Laud's view episcopal 
succession was of the essence of a Church, and by their rejection 
of bishops the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches of Germany and 
Switzerland had ceased to be Churches at alL The freedom of 
Avorship therefore which had been allowed to the Huguenot refu- 
gees from France, or the Walloons from Flanders, was suddenly 
withdrawn ; and the requirement of conformity with the Anglican 
ritual drove them in crowds from the southern ports to seek toler- 
ation in Holland. The same conformity Avas required from the 
English soldiers and merchants abroad, who had hitherto attend- 
ed Avithout scruple the services of the Calvinistic Churches. The 
English embassador in Paris was forbidden to visit the Huguenot 
conventicle at Charenton. As Laud dreAV further from the Prot- 
estants of the Continent, he drew, consciously or unconsciously, 
nearer to Rome. His theory OAvn'ed Rome as a true branch of the 
Church, though severed from that of England by errors and inno- 
vations against which Laud vigorously protested. But Avith the 
removal of these obstacles reunion would naturally folloAV, and his 
dream was that of bridging over the gulf which ever since the Ref- 
ormation had parted the two Churches. The secret ofier of a car- 
dinal's hat proved Rome's sense that Laud Avas doing his work for 
her; Avhile his rejection of it, and his own reiterated protestations, 
prove equally that he Avas doing it unconsciously. Union Avith 
the great body of Catholicism, indeed, he regarded as a work which 
only time could bring about, but for Avhich he could prepare the 
Church of England by raising it to a higher standard of Catholic 
feeling and Catholic practice. The great obstacle in his Avay was 
the Puritanism of nine tenths of the English people, and on Puri- 
tanism he made Avar Avithout mercy. No sooner had his elevation 
to the see of Canterbury placed him at the head of the English 
Church, than he turned the High Commission into a standing at- 



500 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



tack on the Puritan ministers. Rectors and vicars were scolded, 
suspended, deprived for " Gospel preaching." The use of the sur- 
plice and the ceremonies most oifensive to Puritan feeling were 
enforced in every parish. The lectures founded in towns which 
were the favorite posts of Puritan preachers were rigorously sup- 
pressed. They found a refuge among the country gentlemen, and 
the Archbishop withdrew from the country gentlemen the privi- 
lege of keeping chaplains, which they had till then enjoyed. As 
parishes became vacant the High Church bishops filled them with 
men who denounced Calvinism, and declared passive obedience to 
the sovereign to be part of the law of God. The Puritans soon 
felt the stress of this jjrocess, and endeavored to meet it by buying 
up the appropriations of livings, and securing through feeoffees a 
succession of Protestant ininisters in the parishes of which they 
were patrons ; but Laud cited the feeoffees into the Star-Chamber, 
and roughly put an end to them. Nor was the persecution confined 
to the clergy. Under the two last reigns the small pocket Bibles 
called the Geneva Bibles had become universally popular among 
English laymen ; but their marginal notes were found to savor of 
Calvinism, and their importation was prohibited. The habit of 
receiving the communion in a sitting posture had become com- 
mon, but kneeling was now enforced, and hundreds were excom- 
municated for refusing to comply with the injunction. A more 
galling means of annoyance was found in the different views of 
the two religious parties on the subject of Sunday. The Puritans 
identified the Lord's day with the Jewish Sabbath, and transferred 
to the one the strict observances which were required for the oth- 
er. The Laudian clergy, on the other hand, regarded it simply as 
one among the holidays of the Church, and encouraged their flocks 
in the pastimes and the recreations after service which had been 
common before the Reformation. The Crown under James had 
taken part with the High Churchmen, and had issued a " Book of 
Sports " which recommended certain games as lawful and desira- 
ble on the Lord's day. The Parliament, as might be expected, 
was stoutly on the other side, and had forbidden Sunday pastimes 
by statute. The general religious sense of the country was un- 
doubtedly tending to a stricter observance of the day, when Laud 
brought the contest to a sudden issue. He summoned the Chief- 
Justice, Richardson, who had enforced the statute in the western 
shires, to the Council-table, and rated him so violently that the old 
man came out complaining he had been all but choked by a pair 
of lawn sleeves. He then ordered every minister to read the Roy- 
al declaration in favor of Sunday pastimes from the pulpit. One 
Puritan minister had the wit to obey, and to close the reading 
with the significant hint — " You have heard read, good people, both 
the commandment of God and the commandment of man ! Obey 
which you please." But the bulk refused to comply with the Arch- 
bishop's will. The result followed at which Laud no doubt had 
aimed. Hundreds of Puritan ministers were cited before the High 
Commission, and silenced or deprived. In the diocese of ISTorvvich 
alone thirty parochial ministers were expelled from their cures. 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



>01 



The suppression of Puritanism in the ranks of the clergy was 
onlv a preliminary to the real work on which the Archbishop's 
mind was set, the preparation for Catholic reunion by the eleva- 
tion of the clergy to a Catholic standard in doctrine and ritual. 
Laud publicly avowed his preference of an unmarried to a married 
priesthood. Some of the bishops, and a large part of the new 
clergy who occupied the posts from which the Puritan ministers 
had been driven, advocated doctrines and customs which the Re- 
formers had denounced as sheer Papistry ; the practice, for instance, 
of auricular confession, a real presence in the Sacrament, or prayers 
for the dead. One prelate, Montagu, was in heart a convert to 
Rome, Another, Goodman, died acknowledging himself a Papist. 
Meanwhile Laud was indefatigable in his efforts to raise the civil 
and political status of the clergy to the point which it had reach- 
ed ere the fatal blow of the Reformation fell on the priesthood. 
Among the archives of his see lies a large and costly volume in 
vellum, containing a copy of such records in the Tower as con- 
cerned the privileges of the clergy. Its compilation was entered 
in the Ai-chbishop's diary as one among the " twenty-one things 
which I have projected to do if God bless me in them," and as 
among the fifteen to which before his fall he had been enabled to 
add his emphatic " done. " The power of the Bishops' Courts, 
which had long fallen into decay, revived under his jDatronage. 
In 1636 he was able to induce the King to raise a prelate, Juxon, 
Bishop of London, to the highest civil post in the realm, that of 
Lord High Treasurer. "No Chui'chman had it since Henry the 
Seventh's time," Laud comments proudly. "I pray God bless him 
to carry it so that the Church may have honor, and the State 
service and content by it. And now, if the Church will not hold 
up themselves, under God I can do no moi'e," As he aimed at a 
higher standard of Catholicism in the clergy, so he aimed at a 
nearer approach to the pomp of Catholicism in public worship. 
His conduct in his own house at Lambeth brings out with singular 
vividness the reckless courage with Avhich he threw himself across 
the religious instincts of a time when the spiritual aspect of wor- 
ship was overpowering in most men's minds its assthetic and de- 
votional sides. Men noted as a fatal omen the accident which 
marked his first entry into Lambeth ; for the overladen ferry-boat 
upset in the passage of the river, and though the horses and serv- 
ants were saved, the Archbishop's coach remained at the bottom 
of the Thames, But no omen, carefully as he might note it, 
brought a moment's hesitation to the bold, narrow mind of the 
new Primate. His first act, he boasted, was the setting about a 
restoration of his chapel; and, as Laud managed it, his restoration 
was the simple undoing of all that had been done there by his 
predecessors since the Reformation, In Edward's time iconoclasm 
had dashed the stained glass from its windows ; in Elizabeth's 
time the communion table had been moved into the middle of the 
chapel. It was probably Abbot who had abolished the organ and 
choir. Abbot, indeed, had put the finishing stroke on all attempts 
at a higher ceremonial. Neither he nor his household would bow 



502 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



at the name of Christ. The credence table had disappeared. 
Copes, still in use at the communion in Parker's day, had ceased 
to be used in Laud's. Bai-e as its worship was, however, the chapel 
of Lambeth House was one of the most conspicuous among the 
ecclesiastical buildings of the time; it had seen the daily worship 
of every Primate since Cranmer, and was a place " whither many 
of the nobility, judges, clergy, and persons of all sorts, as well 
strangers as natives, usually resorted," But to Laud its state 
seemed intolerable. With characteristic energy he aided witli his 
own hands in the replacement of the painted glass in its windows, 
and racked his wits in piecing the fragments together. Tlie 
glazier was scandalized by the Primate's express command to re- 
pair and set up again the " broken crucifix" in the east window. 
The holy table was removed from the centre, and set altarwise 
against the eastern wall, with a cloth of arras behind it, on which 
was embroidered the history of the Last Supper. The elaborate 
woodwork of the screen, the rich copes of the chaplain, the silver 
candlesticks, the credence table, the organ and the choir, the 
stately ritual, the bowings at the sacred name, the genuflexions 
to the altar, made the chapel at last such a model of worship as 
Laud desired. If he could not exact an equal pomp of devotion 
in other quarters, he exacted as much as he could. Bowing to the 
altar was introduced in all cathedral churches. A royal injunc- 
tion ordered the removal of the communion table, which for ihe 
last half-century or more had in almost every parish church stood, 
in the middle of the aisle, back to its pre-Reformation position in 
the chancel, and secured it from profanation by a raik The re- 
moval implied, and was understood to imply, a recognition of the, 
Real Presence, and a denial of the doctrine which Englishmen 
generally held about the Lord's Supper. But, strenuous as Avas 
the resistance Laud encountered, his pertinacity and severity 
warred it down. Vicars who denounced the change from their 
pulpits were fined, imprisoned, and deprived of their benefices. 
Churchwardens who refused or delayed to obey the injunction 
were rated at the Commission-table, and frightened into com- 
pliance. 

In their last Remonstrance to the King, the Commons had de- 
nounced Laud as the chief assailant of the Protestant character of 
the Church of England, and every year of his Primacy showed 
him bent upon justifying the accusation. His policy was no long- 
er the purely conservative policy of Parker or Whitgift ; it was 
aggressive and revolutionary. His "new counsels" threw what- 
ever force there was in the feeling of conservatism into the hands 
of the Puritan, for it was the Puritan who now seemed to be de- 
fending the old character of the Church of England against its 
Primate's attacks. But backed as Laud was by the power of the 
Crown, the struggle became more hopeless every day. The Puri- 
tan saw his ministers silenced, or deprived, his Sabbath profaned, 
the most sacred act of his worship brought near, as he fancied, to 
the Roman mass. Roman doctrine met him from the pulpit, 
Roman practices met him in the Church. We can hardly wonder 



VIII. J 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



603 



that with such a world around them " godly people in England 
began to apprehend a special hand of Providence in raising this 
plantation" in Massachusetts; "and their hearts were generally- 
stirred to come over." It was in vain that Aveaker men returned 
to bring news of hardships and dangers, and told how two hun- 
dred of the new-comers had perished with their first wintei-. A 
letter from Winthrop told how the rest toiled manfully on. " We 
now enjoy God and Jesus Christ," he wrote to those at home, 
" and is not that enough ? I thank God I like so well to be here 
as I do not repent my coming. I would not have altered my 
course though I had foreseen all these afflictions. I never had 
more content of mind." With the strength and manliness of 
Puritanism, its bigotry and narrowness had crossed the Atlantic 
too. Roger Williams, a young minister who held the doctrine of 
freedom of conscience, was driven from the new settlement, to 
become a preacher among the settlers of Rhode Island. The 
bitter resentment stirred in the emigrants by persecution at home 
was seen in their abolition of Episcopacy and their prohibition of 
the use of the Book of Common Prayer. The intensity of its relig- 
ious sentiments turned the colony into a theocracy. "To the end 
that the body of the Commons may be preserved of honest and 
good men, it was ordered and agreed that for the time to come 
no man shall be admitted to the freedom of the body politic but 
such as are members of some of the churches within the bounds of 
the same." As Laud's hands grew heavier, the number of Puritan 
emigrants rose fast. Three thousand new colonists arrived from 
England in a single year. The landing of Harry Vane, the son of 
a Secretary of State, and destined to play one of the first parts in 
the coming revolution, seemed to herald the coming of the very 
heads of the Puritan movement. The story that a Royal embargo 
alone prevented Cromwell from crossing the seas is probably un- 
founded, but it is certain that nothing but the great change Avhich 
followed on the Scotch rising prevented the flight of men of the 
highest rfink. Lord Warwick secured the proprietorship of the 
Connecticut valley. Lord Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke began 
negotiations for transferring themselves to the New World. 
Hampden purchased a tract of land on the JSTarragansett. The 
growing stream of meaner emigrants mai-ks the terrible pressure 
of the time. Between the sailing of Winthrop's expedition and 
the assembly of the Long Parliament — in the space, that is, often 
or eleven ^^ears — two hundred emigrant ships had crossed the At- 
lantic, and twenty thousand Englishmen had found a refuge in 
the West. 



Section V.— Tl»e Tyranny. 1629—1640. 

[Authorities. — For ths general events of the time, see previous sections. The 
"Strafford Letters," and the Calendars of Domestic State Papers for this period, 
give its real history. " Baillie's Letters"' tell the story of the Scotch rising. Gen- 
erally, Scotch affairs may be best studied in Mr. Burton's admirable "History of 
Scotland." Portraits of Weston, and most of the statesmen of this period, may be 
found in the earlier part of Clarendon's "History of the Eebellion."] 



504 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



At the opening of his Third Parliament Charles had hinted in 
ominous words that the continuance of Parliament at all depend- 
ed on its compliance with his will. " If you do not your duty," 
said the King, " mine would then order me to use those other 
means which God has put into my hand." The threat, however, 
failed to break the resistance of the Commons, and the ominous 
words passed into a settled policy. "We have showed," said a 
Proclamation which followed on the dissolution of the Houses, 
"by our frequent meeting our people, our love to the use of Par- 
liament ; yet, the late abuse having for the present driven us un- 
willingly out of that course, we shall account it presumption for 
any to prescribe any time unto us for Parliament." 

No Parliament, in fact, met for eleven years. But it would be 
unjust to charge the King at the outset of this period with any 
definite scheme of establishing a tyranny, or of changing what he 
conceived to be the older constitution of the realm. He "hated 
the very name of Parliaments," but in spite of his hate he had no 
settled purpose of abolishing them. His belief was that England 
would in time recover its senses, and that then Parliament might 
re-assemble without inconvenience to the Crown. In the interval, 
however long it might be, he proposed to govern single-handed 
by the use of "those means which God had put into his hands." 
Resistance, indeed, he was resolved to put down. The leaders of 
the country party in the last Parliament were thrown into prison ; 
and Eliot died, the first martyr of English liberty, in the Tower. 
Men were forbidden to speak of the re-assembling of a Parliament. 
Laud was encouraged to break the obstinate opposition of the 
Puritans by the enforcement of religious uniformity. But here 
the King stopped. The opportunity which might have suggested 
dreams of organized despotism to a Richelieu, suggested only 
means of filling the Exchequer to Charles. He had in truth nei- 
ther the grander nor the meaner instincts of the born tyrant. He 
did not seek to gain an absolute power over his people, because 
he believed that his absolute power was already a paft of the 
constitution of the country. He set up no standing army to se- 
cure it, partly because he was poor, but yet more because his 
fxith in his position was such that he never dreamed of any effect- 
ual resistance. His expedients for freeing the Crown from that 
dependence on Parliaments against which his pride as a sovereign 
revolted were simply peace and economy. To secure the first he 
sacrificed an opportunity greater than ever his father had trodden 
under foot. The fortunes of the great struggle in Germany were 
suddenly reversed at this juncture by the appearance of Gustavus 
Adolphus, with a Swedish army, in the heart of Germany. Tilly 
was defeated and slain; the Catholic League humbled in the dust; 
Mimich, the capital of its Bavarian leader, occupied by the Swed- 
ish army, and the Lutheran Princes of North Germany freed from 
the pressure of the Imperial soldiery; while the Emperor himself, 
trembling within the walls of Vienna, was driven to call for aid 
from Wallenstein, an adventurer whose ambition he dreaded, but 
whose army could alone arrest the progress of the Protestant con- 



YIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



505 



qaeror. The ruin that James had wrought was suddenly avert- 
ed ; but the victories of Protestantism had no more power to draw 
Charles out of the petty circle of his politics at home tlian its de- 
feats had had power to draw James out of the circle of his im- 
becile diplomacy. To support Gustavus by arms, or even by an 
imposing neutrality, meant a charge on the Royal Treasury which 
necessitated a fresh appeal to the Commons ; and this appeal 
Charles was resolved never to make. At the very crisis of the 
struggle therefore he patched up a hasty peace with both the 
two great Catholic powers of France and Spain, and fell back 
from any interference with the affairs of the Continent. His 
whole attention was absorbed by the pressing question of reve- 
nue. The debt was a large one ; and the ordinary income of the 
Crown, unaided by Parliamentary supplies, was utterly inade- 
quate to meet its ordinary expenditure. Charles was himself 
frugal and laborious; and the administration of Weston, the new 
Lord Treasurer, whom he created Eai-1 of Portland, contrasted 
advantageously with the waste and extravagance of the govern- 
ment under Buckingham. But economy failed to close the yawn- 
ing gulf of the Treasury, and the course into which Charles was 
driven by the financial pressure showed with how wise a pre- 
science the Commons had fixed on the point of arbitrary taxation 
as the chief danger to constitutional freedom. 

It is curious to see to what shifts the Royal pride was driven 
in its effort at once to fill the Exchequer, and yet to avoid, as far 
as it could, any direct breach of constitutional law in the imposi- 
tion of taxes by the sole authority of the Crown. The dormant 
powers of the prerogative were strained to their utmost. The 
right of the Crown to force knighthood on the landed gentry was 
revived, in order to squeeze them into composition for the refusal 
of it. Fines were levied on them for the redress of defects in 
their title-deeds. A Commission of the Forests exacted large 
sums from the neighboi'ing landowners for their encroachments 
on Crown lands. London, the special object of courtly dislike, 
on account of its stubborn Puritanism, was brought within the 
sweep of Royal extortion by the enforcement of an illegal proc- 
lamation which James had issued, pi"ohibiting its extension. 
Every house throughout the large suburban districts in which 
the prohibition had been disregaixled was only saved from demo- 
lition by the payment of three years' rental to the Crown. The 
Treasury gained a hundred thousand pounds by this clever stroke, 
and Charles gained the bitter enmity of the great city whose 
strength and resources were fatal to him in the coming war. 
Though the Catholics were no longer troubled by any active per- 
secution, and the Lord Treasurer was in heart a Papist, the pen- 
ury of the Exchequer forced the Crown to maintain the old sys- 
tem of fines for "recusancy." Vexatious measures of extortion 
such as these were far less hurtful to the State than the conver- 
sion of justice into a means of supplying the Royal necessities by 
means of the Star-Chamber. The jurisdiction of the King's Coun- 
cil had been revived, as we have seen, by Wolsey as a check on 



506 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the nobles; and it had received great development, especially on 
the side of criminal law, during the Tudor reigns. Forgery, per- 
jury, riot, maintenance, fraud, libel, and conspiracy were the 
chief oftenses cognizable in this court; but its scope extended to 
every misdemeanor, and especially to charges where, from the 
imperfection of the common law or the power of offenders, justice 
was baffled in the lower courts. Its process resembled that of 
Chancery : it usually acted on an information laid before it by 
the King's Attorney. Both witnesses and accused were examined 
on oath by special interrogatories, and the court was at liberty 
to adjudge any punishment short of death. The possession of 
such a weapon would have been fatal to liberty under a great 
tyrant; under Charles it was turned simply to the profit of the 
Exchequer. Large numbers of cases which would ordinarily have 
come before the Courts of Common Law were called before the 
Star-Chamber, simply for the purpose of levying fines for the 
Crown. The same motive accounts for the enormous penalties 
which were exacted for offenses of a trivial character. The mar- 
riage of a gentleman with his niece was punished by the forfeit- 
ure of twelve thousand pounds, and fines of four and five thousand 
pounds were awai'ded for brawls between lords of the Court. 
Money for the fleet was procured by a stretch of the prerogative 
which led afterward to the great contest over ship-money. The 
legal research of Noy, one of the law ofiicers of the Crown, found 
precedents among the records in the Tower for the provision of 
ships for the King's use by the port-towns of the kingdom, and 
for the furnishing of their equipment by the maritime counties. 
The precedents dated from times when no permanent fleet exist-* 
ed, and when sea warfare was waged by vessels lent for the mo- 
ment by the various ports. But they were seized as a means of 
equipping a permanent navy without cost to the Exchequer; and 
the writs Avhich were issued to London and the chief English 
ports were enforced by fine and imprisonment. Shifts of tliis 
kind, however, did little to fill the Treasury, great as was the 
annoyance they caused. Charles was driven from courses of 
doubtful legality to a more open defiance of law. Monopolies, 
abandoned by Elizabeth, extinguished by Act of Parliament un- 
der James, and denounced with his own assent in the Petition of 
Right, were revived on a scale far more gigantic than had been 
seen before, the companies who undertook them paying a fixed 
duty on their profits as well as a large sura for the original con- 
cession of the monopoly. Wine, soap, salt, and almost every ar- 
ticle of domestic consumption, fell into the hands of monopolists, 
and rose in price out of all proportion to the profit gained by the 
Crown. "They sup in our cu]:)," Colepepper said afterward in 
the Long Parliament, "they dip in our dish, they sit by our fire; 
we find them in the dye-fat, the Avash-bowls, and the powdering 
tub. They share with the cutler in his box. They have marked 
and sealed us from head to foot." Nothing, indeed, better marks 
the character of Charles than his conduct as to the Petition of 
Right. He had given his assent to it, he was fond of bidding 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



507 



Parliament rely on his " Royal word," but the thought of his 
pledge seems never to have troubled him for an instant. From 
the moment he began his career of government without a Parlia- 
ment every one of ti.-e abuses he had promised to abolish, such as 
illegal imprisonment or tampering with the judges, was resorted 
to as a matter of course. His penury, in spite of the financial ex- 
pedients we have described, drove him inevitably on to the fatal 
rock of illegal taxation. The exaction of Customs duties went on 
as of old at the ports. Writs were issued for the levy of " be- 
nevolences" from the shires. The resistance of the London mer- 
chants was roughly put down by the Star-Chamber. Chambers, 
an alderman of London, who complained bitterly that men were 
worse off in Turkey than in England, was ruined by a fine of two 
thousand pounds, and died broken-hearted in prison. The free- 
holders of the counties were more difficult to deal with. When 
those of Cornwall were called together at Bodmin to contribute 
to a voluntary loan, half the hundreds refused, and the yield of 
the rest came to little more than two thousand pounds. One of 
the Cornishmen has left an amusing record of the scene before the 
Commissioners appointed for assessment of the loan. "Some with 
great words and threatenings, some with persuasions," he says, 
" were drawn to it. I was like to have been complimented out 
of my money; but knowing with whom I had to deal, I held, when 
I talked with them, my hands fast in my pockets." 

Vexatious indeed and illegal as were the proceedings of the 
Crown, there seems to have been but little apprehension of any 
permanent danger to freedom in the country at large. To those 
who read the letters of the time there is something inexpressibly 
touching in the general faith of their writers in the ultimate vic- 
tory of the Law. Charles was obstinate, but obstinacy was too 
common a foible among Englishmen to rouse any vehement re- 
sentment. The people were as stubborn as their King, and their 
political sense told them that the slightest disturbance of affairs 
must shake down the financial fabric which Charles was slowly 
bviilding up, and force him back on subsidies and a Parliament, 
Meanwhile they would wait for better days, and their patience 
was aided by the general prosperity of the country. The long 
peace was producing its inevitable results in a vast extension of 
commerce, and a rise of manufactures in the towns of the West 
Riding of Yorkshire. Fresh land was being brought into cultiva- 
tion, and a great scheme was set on foot for reclaiming the Fens. 
The new wealth of the country gentry, through the increase of 
rent, was seen in the splendor of the houses which they were rais- 
ing. The contrast of this peace and pi'osperity with the ruin and 
bloodshed of the Continent afibrded a ready ai-gument to the 
friends of the King's system. So tranquil was the outer ap- 
peai'ance of the country that in Court circles all sense of danger 
had disappeared. "Some of the greatest statesmen and privy 
councilors," says May, "would ordinarily laugh when the word 
'liberty of the subject' was named." There were courtiers bold 
enough to express their hope that "the King would never need 



608 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



any more Parliaments." But beneath this outer cahn, " the coun- 
try," Clarendon honestly tells us while eulogizing the peace, "was 
full of pride and mutiny and discontent." Thousands, as we have 
seen, were quitting England for America. The gentry held aloof 
from the Court. "The common peoj)le in the generality and the 
country freeholders would rationally argue of their own rights and 
the oppressions which were laid upon them." If Charles was con- 
tent to deceive himself, there was one man among his ministers 
who saw that the people were right in their policy of patience, 
and that unless other measures were taken the fabric of Royal 
despotism would fall at the first breath of adverse fortune. Sir 
Thomas Wentworth, a great Yorkshire landowner, and one of the 
representatives of his county in Parliament, had stood for years 
past among the more prominent members of the Country party in 
the Commons. But from the first moment of his appearance in 
public his passionate desire had been to find employment in the 
service of the Crown. At the close of the preceding reign he was 
already connected with the Court, he had secured a seat in York- 
shire for one of the Royal ministers, and was believed to be on 
the high road to a peerage. But the consciousness of political 
ability which spurred his ambition roused the jealousy of Buck- 
ingham ; and the haughty pride of Wentworth was flung by re- 
peated slights into an attitude of opposition, which his eloquence 
— grander in its sudden outbursts, though less earnest and sus- 
tained, than that of Eliot — soon rendered formidable. But his 
patriotism was still little more than hostility to the favorite, and 
his intrigues at Court roused Buckingham to crush, by a signal 
insult, the rival whose genius he instinctively dreaded. Whiles 
sitting in his court as Sheriff of Yorkshire, Wentworth received 
the announcement of his dismissal from office, and of the gift of 
his post to Sir John Savile, his rival in the county. " Since they 
will thus weakly breathe on me a seeming disgrace in the jjublic 
face of my country," he said with a characteristic outburst of con- 
temptuous pride, " I shall crave leave to wipe it away as openly, 
as easily !" He sprang at once to the front of the Commons in 
urging the Petition of Right. Whether in that crisis of Went- 
worth's life- some nobler impulse, some true passion for the free- 
dom he was to betray, mingled with his thirst for revenge, it is 
hard to tell. But his words were words of fire. " If he did not 
faithfully insist for the common liberty of the subject to be pre- 
served whole and entire," it was thus he closed one of his speeches 
on the Petition, "it was his desire that he might be set as a beacon 
on a hill for all men else to wonder at." 

It is as such a beacon that his name has stood from that time 
to this. The death of Buckingham had no sooner removed the 
obstacle that stood between his ambition and the end at which it 
had aimed throughout, than the cloak of patriotism was flung by. 
Wentworth was admitted to the Royal Council, and as he took 
his seat at the board he promised to " vindicate the Monarchy for- 
ever from the conditions and restraints of subjects." So great 
was the faith in his zeal and power which he knew how to breathe 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



509 



into his Royal master, that he was at once raised to the peerage, 
and rewarded with the high post of Lord President of the North. 
Charles had good ground for this rajDid confidence in his new min- 
ister. In Wentworth — or as Ave may call him from the title he 
assumed at the close of his life, the Earl of Strafford — the very 
genius of tyranny was embodied. He was far too clear-sighted 
to share his master's belief that the arbitrary power which Charles 
was wielding formed any part of the old constitution of the coun- 
tr}", or to believe that the mere lapse of time would so change the 
temper of Englishmen as to reconcile them to despotism. He 
knew that absolute rule was a new thing in England, and that 
the only way of permanently establishing it was not by reasoning, 
or by the foi'ce of custom, but by the force of fear. His system 
was the expression of his own inner temper; and the dark, gloomy 
countenance, the full, heavy eye, which meet us in Strafford's por- 
trait, are the best commentary on his policy of "Thorough." It 
M'as by the sheer strength of his genius, by the terror his violence 
inspired amid the meaner men whom Buckingham had left, by the 
general sense of his power, that he had forced himself upon the 
Court. He had none of the small arts of a courtier. His air was 
that of a silent, proud, passionate man ; when he first appeared at 
Whitehall his rough uncourtly manners provoked a smile in the 
Royal circle, but the smile soon died into a general hate. The 
Queen, frivolous and meddlesome as she was, detested him; his fel- 
low-ministers intrigued against him, and seized on his hot speeches 
against the great lords, his quarrels with the Royal household, his 
transports of passion at the very Council-table, to ruin him in his 
master's favor. The King himself, while steadily supporting him 
against his rivals, was utterly unable to understand his drift. 
Charles valued him as an administrator, disdainful of private ends, 
crushing great and small with the same haughty indifference to 
men's love or hate, and devoted to the one aim of building up the 
power of the Crown. But in his purpose of preparing for the 
great struggle with freedom which he saw before him, of building 
up by force such a despotism in England as Richelieu was build- 
ing up in France, and of thus making England as great in Europe 
as France had been made by Richelieu,"he could look for little 
sympathy and less help from the King. 

Wentworth's genius turned impatiently to a sphere where it 
could act alone, untrammeled by the hinderances it encountered 
at home.^ ^ His purpose was to prepare for the coming contest by 
the provision of a fixed revenue, arsenals, fortresses, and a stand- 
ing army, and it was in Ireland that he resolved to find them. He 
saw in the miserable country which had hitherto been a drain 
upon the resources of the Crown the lever he needed for the over- 
throw of English freedom. It was easy by the balance of Catho- 
lic against Protestant to make both parties dependent on the 
Royal authority; the rights of conquest, which in Strafford's 
theory vested the whole land in the absolute possession of the 
Crown, gave him a large field for his administrative ability ; and 
for the rest he trusted, and trusted justly, to the force of his 



510 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



genius and of his will. In a few years after his appointment as 
Lord Lieutenant, his aim seemed all but realized. "The King," 
he wrote to Laud, " is as absolute here as any prince in the world 
can be." Wentworth's government, indeed, was a mere rule of 
terror. Archbishop Usher, with almost every name which we can 
respect in the island, was the object of his insult and oppression. 
His tyranny strode over all legal bounds. A few insolent words, 
construed as mutiny, were enough to bring Lord Mountnorris 
before a council of war, and to inflict on him a sentence of death. 
In one instance Wentworth stooped to use his power for the basest 
personal ends : an adulterous passion for the Chancellor's daugh- 
ter-in-law led him to order that peer to settle his estate in her 
favor, and, on his refusal, to deprive him of oflice. But such 
instances were rare. His tyranny aimed at public ends, and in 
Ireland the heavy hand of a single despot delivered the mass of 
the people at any rate from the local despotism of a hundred 
masters. The Irish landowners were for the first time made to 
feel themselves amenable to the law. Justice was enforced, out- 
rage was repressed, the condition of the clergy was to some extent 
raised, the sea was cleared of the pirates who infested it. The 
foundation of the linen manufacture Avhich Avas to bring wealth 
to Ulster, and the first development of Irish commerce, date from 
the Lieutenancy of Wentworth. But good government was only 
a means with him for further ends. The noblest work to be done 
in Ireland was the bringing about a reconciliation between Cath- 
olic and Protestant, and an obliteration of the anger and thirst for 
vengeance which had been raised'by the Ulster Plantation. Straf- 
ford, on the other hand, angered the Protestants by a toleratioji 
of Catholic worship and a suspension of the persecution which had 
feebly begun against the priesthood, while he fed the irritation of 
the Catholics by schemes for a Plantation of Connaught. His 
whole aim was to encourage a disunion which left both parties 
dependent for support and protection on the Crown. It was a 
policy which was to end in bringing about the horrors of the Irish 
Massacre, the vengeance of Cromwell, and the long series of atroc- 
ities on both sides which make the story of the country he ruined 
so terrible to tell. But for the hour it left Ireland helpless in his 
hands. He had doubled the revenue. He had raised an army. 
He felt himself strong enough at last, in spite of the panic with 
which Charles heard his project, to summon an Irish Parliament. 
His aim was to read a lesson to England and the King, by showing 
how completely that dreaded thing, a Parliament, could be made 
the organ of the Royal M'ill ; and his success was complete. Two 
thirds, indeed, of an Irish House of Commons consisted of the 
representatives of wretched villages, the pocket-boroughs of the 
Crown ; while absent peers were forced to send in their proxies to 
the Council to be used at its pleasure. But precautions were 
hardly needed. The two Houses trembled at the stern master 
who bade their members not let the King " find them muttering, 
01', to speak it more truly, mutinying in corners," and voted with 
a perfect docility the means of maintaining an array of five thou- 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



511 



sand foot and five hundred horse. Even had the subsidy been re- 
fused, the result would have been the same. "I would undertake," 
wrote Strafibrd, " upon the peril of my head, to make the King's 
army able to subsist and to provide for itself among them with- 
out their help." 

While Strafibrd was thus working out his system of "Thor- 
ough" on one side of St. George's Channel, it was being carried 
out on the other by a mind inferior, indeed, to his own in genius, 
but almost equal to it in courage and tenacity. On the death of 
Weston, Laud became virtually first minister of the Crown at the 
English Council-board. We have already seen wath what a reck- 
less and unscrupulous activity he was crushing Puritanism in the 
English Church, and driving Puritan ministers from English pul- 
pits ; and in tliis work his new position enabled him to back the 
authority of the Hig?i Commission by the terrors of the Star- 
Chamber. It was a work, indeed, which to Laud's mind was at 
once civil and religious : he had allied the cause of ecclesiastical 
dogmatism with that of absolutism in the State ; and, while bor- 
rowing the power of the Crown to crush ecclesiastical liberty, he 
brought the influence of the Church to bear on the ruin of civil 
freedom. But his power stopped at the Scotch frontier. Across 
the Border stood a Church without a bishop, without a ritual, mod- 
eled on the doctrine and system of Geneva, Calvinist in teaching 
and in government. The mere existence of such a Church gave 
countenance to English Puritanism, and threatened in any hour 
of ecclesiastical weakness to bring a Presbyterian influence to 
bear on the Church of England. With Scotland, indeed. Laud 
could only deal indirectly through Charles, for the King was jeal- 
ous of any interference of his English ministers or Parliament 
with his Northern kingdom. But Charles was himself earnest 
to deal with it. He had imbibed his father's hatred of the Pres- 
byterian system, and from the outset of his reign he had been 
making advance after advance toward the re -establishment of 
Episcopacy. To understand, however, what had been done, and 
the relations which had by this time grown up between Scotland 
and its King, we must take up again the brief thread of its history 
which we broke at the moment when Mary fled for refuge over 
the English border. 

After a few years of wise and able rule, the triumph of Protest- 
antism under the Earl of Murray had been interrupted by his 
assassination, by the revival of the Queen's faction, and by the 
renewal of civil war. The reaction, however, was a brief one, and 
the general horror excited by the Massacre of St, Bartholomew 
completed the ruin of the Catholic cause. Edinburgh, the last 
fortress held in Mary's name, surrendered to an English force 
sent by Elizabeth ; and its captain, the chivalrous Kirkcaldy of 
Grange, was hung for treason at the market-cross. The people 
of the Lowlands, indeed, were now stanch for the new faith; and 
the Protestant Church rose rapidly after the death of Knox into 
a power which appealed at every critical juncture to the deeper 
feelings of the nation at large. In the battle with Catholicism 

83 



512 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the bishops had clung to the old religion ; and the new faith, left 
without episcopal interference, and influenced by the Genevan 
training of Knox, borrowed from Calvin its model of Church gov- 
ernment, as it borrowed its theology. The system of Presbyte- 
rianism, as it grew up at the outset without direct recognition 
from the law, bound Scotland together by its administrative organ- 
ization, its church synods and general assemblies, while it called 
the people at large, lay the power it conferred upon the lay elders 
in each congregation, to a voice, and, as it proved, a decisive voice, 
in the administration of affairs. Its government by ministers gave 
it the look of an ecclesiastical despotism ; but no Church constitu- 
tion has proved in practice so democratic as that of Scotland. Its 
influence in raising the nation at large to a consciousness of its 
own power is shown by the change which passes, from the mo- 
ment of its final establishment, over the face of Scotch history. 
The country ceases to belong to the great nobles, Avho had turned 
it into their battle-ground ever since the death of Bruce. After 
the death of the Earl of Morton, M'ho had put an end to the civil 
war, and ruled the country for five years with a wise and steady 
hand, the possession of the young sovereign, James the Sixth, 
was disputed indeed by one noble and another; but the power of 
the Cliurch was felt more and more over nobles and King. Mel- 
ville, who had succeeded to much of Knox's authority, claimed 
for tlie ecclesiastical body an independence of the State, which 
James hardly dared to resent; while he writhed helplessly beneath 
the sway which public opinion, expressed through the General 
Assembly of the Church, exercised over the civil government. In 
the great crisis of the Armada his hands were fettered by tlie 
league with England which it forced upon him. The democratic 
boldness of Calvinism allied itself with the spiritual pride of the 
Presbyterian ministers in their dealings with the Crown. Mel- 
ville in open Council took James by the sleeve, and called him 
" God's silly vassal !" " There are two Kings," he told him, 
when James extolled his Royal authority, " and two kingdoms in 
Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the 
Kirk, whose subject King James the Sixth is, and of whose king- 
doni not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member." The 
words and tone of the great preacher were bitterly remembered 
when James mounted the English throne. "A Scottish Presby- 
tery," he said at the Hampton Court Conference, "as well fit- 
teth with monarchy as God and the devil ! No bishop, no king !" 
But Scotland was resolved on "no bishop." Episcopacy had be- 
come identified among the more zealous Scotchmen with the old 
Catholicism they had shaken off". When he appeared at a later 
time before the English Council-table, Melville took the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury by the sleeves of his rochet, and, shaking 
them in his manner, called them Romish rags, and the mark of 
the Beast. Four years, therefore, after the ruin of the Armada, 
Episcopacy was formally abolished, and the Presbyterian system 
established by law as the mode of government of the Church of 
Scotland. The rule of the Church was placed in a General Assem- 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



513 



bly, with subordinate Provincial Synods, Presbyteries, and Kirk 
Sessions, by which its discipline was carried down to every mem- 
ber of a congregation. As yet, however, the authority of the 
Assembly was hardly felt north of the Tay, while the system of 
Presbytery had by no means won the hold it afterward gained 
over the people, even to the south of that river ; and James had 
no sooner succeeded to the English throne than he used his new 
power in a struggle to undo the work which had been done. Mel- 
ville, after his scornful protest at the Council - table, was banished 
from Scotland, and died in exile at Sedan. The old sees were re- 
stored, and three of the new bishops were consecrated in England, 
and returned to communicate the gift of Apostolical succession to 
their colleagues. But Episcopacy remained simply a name. The 
Presbyterian organization remained untouched in doctrine or dis- 
cipline. All that James could do was to set his prelates to preside 
as permanent moderators in the provincial synods, and to prevent 
the Assembly from meeting without a summons from the Crown. 
The struggle, however, went on throughout his reign with varying 
success. An attempt to vest the government of the Church in the 
King and Bishops was foiled by the protest of the Presbyterian 
party; but a General Assembly, gathered at Perth, was induced 
to adopt some of the ecclesiastical practices most distasteful to 
them. The earlier policy of Charles, though it followed his father's 
line of action, effected little save a partial restoration of Church- 
lands, which the lords were forced to surrender. But Laud had no 
sooner become minister than his vigorous action made itself felt. 
The King's first acts Avere directed rather to points of outer ob- 
servance than to any attack on the actual fabric of Presbyterian 
organization. The Estates were induced to withdraw the control 
of ecclesiastical apparel from the Assembly, and to commit it to 
the Crown : a step soon followed by a resumption of their episco- 
pal costume on the part of the Scotch bishops. When the Bishop 
of Moray pi-eached before Charles in his rochet, on the King's visit 
to Edinburgh, it was the first instance of its use since the Reforma- 
tion. The innovation was followed by the issue of a Royal war- 
rant which directed all ministers to use the surplice in divine wor- 
ship. From costume, however, the busy minister soon passed to 
Aveightier matters. Many years had gone by since he had vainly 
invited James to draw his Scotch " subjects to a nearer conjunction 
with the Liturgy and Canons of this nation." "I sent him back 
again," said the shrewd old King, " with the frivolous draft he had 
drawn. For all that, he feared not my anger, but assaulted me 
again with another ill-fanglfed platform to make that stubborn 
Kirk stoop more to the English platform, but I durst not play fast 
and loose with my word. He knows not the stomach of that 
people." But Laud had known how to wait, and his time had 
come at last. A new diocese, that of Edinburgh, was created, and 
the Archbishop of St. Andrews was named chancellor of the realm. 
A Book of Canons, issued by the sole authority of the King, ignored 
Assembly and Kirk Session, and practically, abolished the whole 
Presbyterian system. As daring a stretch of the prerogative su- 



514 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



perseded what was known as Knox's Liturgy — the Book of Com- 
mon Order drawn up on the Genevan model by that Reformer, 
and generally used throughout Scotland — by a new Liturgy based 
on the English Book of Common Prayer. The Liturgy and Canons 
had been Laud's own handiwork; in their composition the General 
Assembly had neither been consulted nor recognized, and to en- 
force them on Scotland was to effect an ecclesiastical revolution of 
the most serious kind. The books, however, were backed by a 
Royal Lijunction, and Laud flattered himself that the revolution 
liad been wrought. 

Triumphant in Scotland, with Scotch Presbyterianism — as he 
fancied — at his feet. Laud's hand fell heavier than ever on the En- 
glish Puritans. There were signs of a change of temper which 
might have made even a bolder man pause. Thousands, as we 
have seen, of "the best" scholars, merchants, lawyers, farmers, were 
flying over the Atlantic to seek freedom and purity of religion in 
the wilderness. Great landowners and nobles were preparing 
to follow. Hundreds of ministers had quitted their parsonages 
rather than abet the Royal insult to the sanctity of the Sabbath. 
The Puritans who remained among the clergy were giving up 
their homes rather than consent to the change of the sacred ta- 
ble into an altar, or to silence in their protests against the new 
Popery. The noblest of living Englishmen refused to become the 
priest of a Church whose ministry could only be "bought with 
servitude and forspeaking." We liave seen John Milton leave 
Cambridge, self-dedicated " to that same lot, however mean or 
high, to which time leads me and the will of Heaven." But the 
lot to which these called him ivas not the ministerial ofiice.to 
which he had been destined from his childhood. In later life he 
told bitterly the story how he had been " Church-outed by the 
prelates." " Coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving 
what tyranny had invaded in the Church, that he who would take 
orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which unless 
he took with a conscience that would retch he must either straight 
perjure or split his faith, I thought it better to prefer a blameless 
silence before the sacred ofiice of speaking, bought and begun with 
servitude and forswearing." Li spite therefore of his father's re- 
grets, he retired to a new home which the scrivener had found at 
Horton, a village in the neighborhood of Windsor, and quietly 
busied himself with study and poetry. The poetic impulse of the 
Renascence had been slowly dying away under the Stuarts. The 
stage was falling into mere coarseness and horror ; Shakspere had 
died quietly at Stratford in Milton's childhood ; the last and worst 
play of Ben Jonson appeared in the year of his settlement at Hor- 
ton ; and though Ford and Massinger still lingered on, there were 
no successors for them but Shirley and Davenant. The philo- 
sophic and meditative taste of the age had produced indeed po- 
etic schools of its own : poetic satire had become fashionable in 
Hall, better known afterward as a bishop, and had been carried 
on vigorously by George Wither; the so-called "metaphysical" 
poetry, the vigorous and pithy expression of a cold and prosaic 



viir.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



515 



good sense began with Sir^ohn Davies, and buried itself in f\in- 
tastic affectations in Donnf;/ religious verse had become popular 
in the gloomy allegories oT Quarles and the tender refinement 
which struggfes through a jungle 'of puns and extravagances in 
George Herbert. But what poetic life really remained was to be 
found* only in the caressing fancy and lively badinage of lyric sing- 
ers like Herrick, whose grace is untouched by passion and often 
disfigured by coarseness and pedantry ; or in the school of Spen- 
ser's more direct successors, where Brown, in his pastorals, and the 
two Fletchers, Phineas and Giles, in their unreadable allegories, 
still preserved something of their master's sweetness, if they pre- 
served nothing of his power. Milton was himself a Spenserian; 
he owned to Dryden in later years that "Spenser Avas his orig- 
inal," and in some of his earliest lines at Horton he dwells lovingly 
on "the sage and solemn tunes" of the "Faerie Queene," its "for- 
ests and enchantments drear, where more is meant than meets the 
ear." But of the weakness and affectation which characterized 
Spenser's successors he had not a trace. In the "Allegro" and 
"Penseroso," the first results of his retirement at Horton, we catch 
again the fancy and melody of the Elizabethan verse, the wealth 
of its imagery, its wide sympathy with nature and man. There 
is a loss, perhaps, of the older freedom and spontaneity of the 
Renascence, a rhetorical rather than passionate turn in the young 
poet, a striking absence of dramatic power, and a want of precision 
and exactness even in his picturesque touches. Milton's imagina- 
tion is not strong enough to identify him with the world which he 
imagines: he stands apart from it, and looks at it as from a dis- 
tance, ordering it and arranging it at his will. But if in this respect 
he falls, both in his earlier and later poems, far below Shakspere 
or Spenser, the deficiency is all but compensated by his nobleness 
of feeling and expression, the severity of his taste, his sustained 
dignity, and the perfectness and completeness of his work. The 
moral grandeur of the Puritan breathes, even in these lighter 
pieces of his youth, through every line. The " Comus," planned 
as a masque for the festivities which the Earl of Bridgewater was 
holding at Ludlow Castle, rises into nn almost impassioned plead- 
ing for the love of virtue. 

The historic interest of Milton's "Comus" lies in its forming 
part of a protest made by the more cultured Puritans at this time 
against the gloomier bigotry which persecution Avas fostering in 
the party at large. The patience of Englishmen, in fact, was slow- 
ly wearing out. There was a sudden upgrowth of virulent pam- 
phlets of the old Martin Marprelate type. Men, whose names no 
one asked, hawked libels, whose authorship no one knew, from the 
door of the tradesman to the door of the squire. As the hopes of 
a Parliament grew fainter, and men despaired of any legal remedy, 
violent and weak-headed fanatics came, as at such times they al- 
ways come, to the front. Leighton, the father of the saintly Arch- 
bishop of that name, had given a specimen of their tone at the 
outset of this period, by denouncing the prelates as men of blood. 
Episcopacy as Antichrist, and the Popish queen as a daughter of 



516 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Iletb. The " Histriomastix " of Prynne, a lawyer distinguished 
for his constitutional knowledge, but the most obstinate and nar- 
row-minded of men, marked the deepening of Puritan bigotry un- 
der the fostering warmth of Laud's persecution. The book was 
an attack on players as the ministers of Satan, on theatres as the 
devil's chapels, on hunting. May-poles, the decking of houses at 
Christmas with evergreens, on cards, music, and false hair. The 
attack on the stage was as offensive to the more cultured minds 
among the Puritan party as to the Court itself ; Selden and White- 
lock took a prominent part in preparing the grand masque by 
which the Inns of Court resolved to answer its challenge, and in 
the following year Milton wrote his masque of " Comus" for Lud- 
low Castle. To leave Prynne, however, simply to the censure of 
wiser men than himself Avas too sensible a course for the angry 
Primate. No man was ever sent to prison before or since for such 
a sheer mass of nonsense ; but the prison with which Laud reward- 
ed Prynne's enormous folio tamed his spirit so little that a new 
tract written within its walls attacked the bishops as devouring 
wolves and lords of Lucifer. A fellow-prisoner, John Bastwick, 
declared in his "Litany" that "Hell was broke loose, and the 
devils in surplices, hoods, cojdcs, and rochets were come among 
us." Burton, a London clergyman silenced by the High Commis- 
sion, called on all Christians to resist the bishops as "robbers of 
souls, limbs of the Beast, and tactors of Antichrist." Raving of 
this sort, however, though it showed how fast the storm of popular 
passion was gathering, was not so pressing a difficulty to the 
Royal ministers at this time as the old difficulty of the Exchequer. 
The ingenious devices of tlie Court lawyers, the revived prerog- 
atives, the illegal customs, the fines and confiscations which were 
alienating one class after another, and sowing in home after home 
the seeds of a bitter hatred to the Crown, had failed to recruit the 
Treasury. Li spite of the severe economy of Charles and his min- 
isters new exactions were necessary, at a time when the rising- 
discontent made every new exaction a challenge to revolt. But 
danger and difficulty were lost on the temper of the two men who 
really governed England. To Laud and Strafford, indeed, the 
King seemed overcautious, the Star- Chamber feeble, the judges 
overscrupulous. "I am for Thorough," the one writes to the 
other in alternate fits of impatience at the slow progress they are 
making. Strafford was anxious that his good work might not 
"be spoiled on that side." Laud echoed the wish, while he envied 
the fi'ee course of the Lord Lieutenant. " You have a good deal 
of humor here," he writes, "for your proceeding. Go on a' God's 
name. I have done with expecting of Thorough on this side," 
The financial jDressure was seized by both to force the King on to 
a bolder course. "The debt of the Crown being taken off," Straf- 
ford urged, " you may govern at your will." All pretense of prec- 
edents was thrown aside, and Laud resolved to find a permanent 
revenue in the conversion of the " ship-money " levied on jDorts and 
the maritime counties into a general tax imposed by the Royal 
will upon the whole country. The sum expected from the tax was 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



517 



no less than a quarter of a million a year. "I know no reason," 
Strafford had written significantly, " but you may as well rule the 
common lawyers in England as I, poor beagle, do here ;" and a 
bench of judges, remodeled on his hint for the occasion, no sooner 
declared the new impost to be legal than he drew the logical de- 
duction from their decision. " Since it is lawful for the King to 
impose a tax for the equipment of the navy, it must be equally so 
for the levy of an army ; and the same reason which authorizes 
him to levy an army to resist, will authorize him to carry that army 
abroad that he may prevent invasion. Moreover, what is law in 
England is law also in Scotland and Ireland. The decision of the 
judges will therefore make the King absolute at home and formid- 
able abroad. Let him only abstain from war for a few years that 
he may habituate his subjects to the payment of that tax, and in 
the end he will find himself more powerful and respected than any 
of his predecessors." But there were men who saw the danger to 
freedom in this levy of shij^-money as clearly as Straiford himself 
John Hampden, a friend of Eliot's, a man of consummate abili- 
ty, of unequaled power of persuasion, of a keen intelligence, ripe 
learning, and a character singularly pure and lovable, had already 
shown the firmness of his temper in his refusal to contribute to the 
forced loan of 1626. He now repeated his refusal, declared ship- 
money an illegal impost, 'and resolved to rouse the spirit of the 
country by an appeal for protection to the law. 

The news of Hampden's resistance thrilled through England at 
the very moment when men were roused by the news of riesistance 
in the north. The submission with Avhich Scotland had bent to 
aggression after aggression found an end at last. The Dean of 
Edinburgh had no sooner opened the new Prayer Book than a 
murmur ran through the congregation, and a stool hurled from 
among the crowd felled him to the ground. The church was clear- 
ed, the service read, but the rising discontent frightened the judges 
into a decision that the Royal writ enjoined the purchase, and not 
the use, of the Prayer Book. Its use was at once discontinued, 
and the angry orders which came from England for its restoration 
Avere met by a shower of protests from every part of Scotland. 
The Duke of Lennox alone took sixty-eight petitions with him to 
the Court ; while ministers, nobles, and gentry poured into Edin- 
burgh to organize the national resistance. The eftect of these 
events in Scotland was at once seen in the open demonstration of 
discontent south of the border. Prynne and his fellow-pamphlet- 
eers, when Laud dragged them before the Star-Chamber as "trump- 
ets of sedition," listened with defiance to their sentence of exposure 
in the pillory and imprisonment for life; and the crowd who filled 
Palace Yard to witness their punishment groaned at the cutting 
off of their ears, and "gave a great shout" when Prynne urged 
that the sentence on him was contrary to the law. A hundred 
thousand Londoners lined the road as they passed on the way to 
prison; and the journey of these "martyrs," as the spectators call- 
ed them, was like a triumphal progi-ess. Startled as he was at the 
sudden burst of popular feeling, Laud was dauntless as ever ; and 



518 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Prynne's entertainers, as he passed through the conntry, were sum- 
moned before the Star-Chaniber, while the censorship struck fiercer 
blows at the Puritan press. But the real danger lay not in the 
libels of silly zealots, but in the attitude of Scotland, and in the 
effect which was being produced in England at large by the trial 
of Hampden, For twelve days the cause of ship-money was sol- 
emnly argued before the full bench of judges. It was prov^ed that 
the tax in past times had been levied only in cases of sudden emer- 
gency, and confined to the coast and port towns alone, and that 
even the show of legality had been taken from it by formal statute 
and by the Petition of Right. The case was adjourned, but the 
discussion told not merely on England, but on the temper of the 
Scots. Charles had replied to their petitions by a simple order to 
all strangers to leave the capital. But the Council was unable to 
enforce his order ; and the nobles and gentry before dispersing to 
their homes named a body of delegates, under the odd title of "the 
Tables," who carried on through the winter a series of negotiations 
with the Crown. The negotiations were interrupted in the fol- 
lowing spring by a renewed order for their dispersion, and for the 
acceptance of a Prayer Book; while the judges in England deliv- 
ered at last their long-delayed decision on Hampden's case. All 
save two laid down the broad principle that no statute prohibiting 
arbitrary taxation could be j^leaded against the King's will. " I 
never read or heard," said Judge Berkley, "that lex was rex, but 
it is common and most true that rex is lex," Finch, the Chief- 
justice, summed up the opinions of his fellow-judges. "Acts of 
Parliament to take away the King's royal power in the defense of 
his kingdom are void," he said : "they are void Acts of Parlia-i 
ment to bind the King not to command the subjects, their persons 
and goods, and I say their money too, for no Acts of Parliament 
made any difference." 

" I wish Mr. Hampden and others to his likeness," the Lord Lieu- 
tenant wrote bitterly from L'eland, " were well whipped into their 
right senses." Amid the exultation of the Court over the deci- 
sion of the judges, Wentworth saw clearly that Hampden's work 
had been done. His resistance had roused England to a sense of 
the danger to her freedom, and forced into light the real character 
of the Royal claims. How stern and bitter the temper even of 
the noblest Puritans had become at last we see in the poem which 
Milton produced at this time — his elegy of "Lycidas." Its grave 
and tender lament is broken by a sudden flash of indignation at 
the dangers around the Church, at the " blind mouths that scarce 
themselves know how to hold a sheep-hook," and to whom " the 
hungry sheep look up, and are not fed," while "the grim wolf" of 
Rome " with privy paw daily devours- apace, and nothing said !" 
The stern resolve of the peo^^le to demand justice on their tyrants 
spoke in his threat of the axe. Strafford and Laud, and Charles 
himself, had yet to reckon with "that two-handed engine at the 
door " which stood " ready to smite once, and smite no more." 
But stern as was the general resolve, there Ayas no need for imme- 
diate action, for the difficulties which were gathering in the north 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



519 



were certain to bring a strain on the Government which would 
force it to seek support from the people. The King's demand for 
immediate submission, which reached Edinburgh with the signifi- 
cant comment of the Hampden judgment, at once gathered the 
whole body of remonstrants together around " the Tables " at Stir- 
ling ; and a protestation, read at Edinburgh, was followed, on 
Archibald Johnston of Warriston's suggestion, by the renewal of 
the Covenant with God which had been drawn up and sworn to 
in a previous hour of peril, when Mary was still plotting against 
Protestantism and Spain was preparing its Armada. " We prom- 
ise and swear," ran the solemn engagement at its close, "by the 
great name of the Lord our God, to'continue in the profession and 
obedience of the said religion, and that we shall defend thesame, 
and resist all their contrary errors and corruptions, according to 
our vocation and the utmost of that power which God has put 
into our hands all the days of our life." The Covenant was signed 
in the church-yard of the Gray Friars at Edinburgh, in a tumult of 
enthusiasm, " with such content and joy as those who, having long 
before been outlaws and rebels, are admitted again into covenant 
with God." Gentlemen and nobles rode with the documents in 
their pockets over the country, gathering subscriptions to it, while 
the ministers pressed for a general consent to it from the pulpit. 
But pressure was needless. " Such was the zeal of subscribers 
that for a while many subscribed with tears on their cheeks ;" 
some were indeed reputed to have " drawn their own blood and 
used it in place of ink to underwrite their names," The force 
given to Scottish freedom by this revival of religious fervor was 
seen in the new tone adopted by the Covenanters. The Marquis 
of Hamilton, who had come as Royal Commissioner to put an end 
to the quarrel, was at once met by demands for an abolition of the 
Court of High Commission, the Avithdrawal of the Books of Canons 
and Common Prayer, a free Parliament, and a free General Assem- 
bly. It was in vain that he threatened war ; even the Council 
pressed Charles to give fuller satisfaction to the people. " I will 
rather die," the King wrote to Hamilton, " than yield to these im- 
pertinent and damnable demands ;" but it Avas needful to gain 
time. "The discontents at home," wrote Lord Northumberland 
to Strafford, " do rather increase than lessen ;" and Charles was 
Avithout money or men. It was in vain that he begged for a loan 
from Spain on promise of declaring war against Holland, or that 
he tried to procure ten thousand troops from Flanders, who might 
be useful in England after their victory over Scottish freedom. 
The loan and troops were both refused, and the contributions of- 
fered by the English Catholics did little to recruit the Exchequer. 
Charles had directed the Marquis to delay any decisive breacli till 
the Royal fleet appeared in the Forth ; but it was hard to equip a 
fleet at all. Scotland, indeed, was sooner ready for war than the 
King. The volunteers who had been serving in the Thirty -Years' 
War streamed home at the call of their brethren. General Leslie, 
a veteran trained under Gustavus, came from Sweden to take the 
command of the new forces. A voluntary war-tax was levied in 



520 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



every shire. The danger at last forced the King to yield to the 
Scotch demands ; but he had no sooner yielded than the conces- 
sion was withdrawn, and the Assembly hardly met before it was 
called upon to disperse. The order, however, was disregarded till 
it had abolished the innovations in worship and discipline, deposed 
the bishops, and formalh'- set the Presbyterian Church courts up 
again. The news that Charles Avas gathering an army at York, 
and reckoning for support on the clans of the north, was answered 
by the seizure of Edinburgh, Dumbarton, and Stirling ; while ten 
thousand well-equipped troops under Leslie and the Earl of Mon- 
trose seized Aberdeen, and brought the Catholic Earl of Huntly a 
prisoner to the south. Instead of overawing the country, the ap- 
pearance of the Royal fleet in the Forth was the signal for Leslie's 
march on the Border. Charles had hardly pushed across the 
Tweed, when the " old little crooked soldier," encamping on the 
hill of Dunse Law, fairly oflered him battle. 

Charles, however, was not strong enough to fight, and the two 
armies returned home on his consent to the gathering of a free 
Assembly and Parliament. But the pacification at Berwick was 
a mere suspension of arms ; the King's summons of Wentworth,. 
now created Earl of Straflbrd, from L-eland was a proof that vio- 
lent measures were in preparation, and the Scots met the challenge 
by demands for the convocation of triennial Parliaments, for free- 
dom of elections and of debate. StrafiTord counseled that they 
should be whipped back into their senses ; and the discovery of a 
correspondence which was being carried on between some of the 
Covenanter leaders and the French Court raised hopes hi the King 
that an appeal to the country for aid against "Scotch treason'' 
would still find an answer in English loyalty. While Straflbrd 
hurried to L-eland to levy forces, Charles summoned Avhat from its 
brief duration is known as the Short Parliament. The Houses met 
in a mood which gave hopes of an accommodation with the Crown, 
but all hope of bringing them into an attack on Scotland proved 
fruitless. The intercepted letters were quietly set aside, and the 
Commons declared, as of old, that redress of grievances must pre- 
cede the grant of supplies. Even an ofter to relinquish ship-money 
filled to draw Parliament from its resolve, and after three weeks' 
sitting it was roughly dissolved. "Things must go worse before 
they go better," was the cool comment of St. John, one of the pa- 
triot leaders. But the country was strangely moved. " So great 
a defection in the kingdom," wrote Lord Northumberland, " hath 
not been known in the memory of man." Straflbrd alone stood 
undaunted. He had returned from Ireland, where he had easily 
obtained money and men from his servile Parliament, to pour fresh 
vigor into the Royal counsels, and to urge that, by the refusal of 
the Parliament to supply the King's wants, Charles was freed from 
all rule of government, and entitled to supply himself at his will. 
The Earl was bent upon war, and took command of the Royal 
army, which again advanced to the north. But the Scots were al- 
ready across the Border; forcing the passage of the Tyne in the 
face of an English detachment, they occupied Newcastle, and dis- 



vni.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



521 



patched from that town their proposals of peace. They prayed 
the King to consider their grievances, and, "with the advice and 
consent of the Estates of England convened in Parliament, to set- 
tle a firm and desirable peace." The prayer was backed by prep- 
arations for a march upon York, where Charles had already aban- 
doned himself to despair. Behind him, in fact, England was all 
but in revolt. The London apprentices mobbed Laud at Lambeth, 
and broke up the sittings of the High Commission at St. Paul's. 
The war was denounced every where as " the Bishops' War,'' and 
the new levies murdered officers whom they suspected of Papistry, 
broke down altar-rails in every church they passed, and deserted 
to their homes. Even in the camp itself neither the threats nor 
prayers of Strafford could recall the troops to their duty, and he 
was forced to own that two mouths were required before they 
could be fit for the field. The success of the Scots emboldened 
two peers, Lord Wharton and Lord Howard, to present a petition 
for peace to the King himself; and though Strafford arrested and 
proposed to shoot them, the Council shrank from desperate courses. 
The threat of a Scotch advance forced Charles at last to give way, 
and after endeavoring to evade the necessity of convoking a Par- 
liament by summoning a " Great Council of the Peers " at York, 
the general repudiation of his project drove him to summon the 
Houses once more to Westminster. 



Section VS.— TIae Ijong Parliament. 1640—1644. 

[^Authorities. — Clarendon's "History of the Eebellion," as Hallani justly says, 
" belongs rather to the class of memoirs " than of histories. The strange contrast 
between the conduct of its author at the time and his later account of the Parlia- 
ment's pi'oceedings, as well as the deliberate and malignant falsehood with which he 
has- perverted almost every fact, destroy his value as an authority during this ear- 
lier period, though his work will always I'etain a literary interest from its nobleness 
of style and the grand series of character-portraits which it embodies. May's 
"History of the Long Parliament" is, for this earlier time, accurate and fairly im- 
partial. But the real bases of any account of it must be found in its own proceed- 
ings, as they are preserved in the Notes of Sir Ralph Verney (edited by Mr. Bruce) 
and Sir Symonds D'Ewes. On the latter of these Mr. Forster has based his his- 
tory of "The Grand Eemonstrance," with his subsequent work on "The Arrest of 
the Five Members," which may be taken as the best text-books for the period they 
cover. Eushworth's collection of State Papers is invaluable for any exact study 
of the times ; that of his rival, Nalson, is untrustworthy, and of small importance. 
Both may be supplemented by the Clarendon and Hardwicke State Papers. Among 
the series of Memoirs which illustrate the whole period of the Eebellion we may as 
yet consult those of Whitelock, Ludlow, Wanvick, Mrs. Hutchinson, and the "Life 
of Clarendon." For Irish affairs see Carte's "Life of Ormond," and the accompa- 
nying papers; for Scotch, Baillie's "Letters," and Mr. Burton's History. Lin- 
gard is useful for information as to intrigues with the Catholics in England and 
Ireland ; and Guizot directs special attention to the relations with foreign powers. 
Pym has been fairly sketched with other statesmen of the time by Mr. Forster in 
his "Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and in an Essay on him by Mr. Goldwin 
Smith. A good deal of valuable research for the period in general is to be found 
in Mr. Sandford's "Illustrations of the Great Eebellion. "J 



If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, the lead- 



522 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



er of the Commons from the first meeting of the new Houses at 
Westminster, stands out for all after-time as the embodiment of 
law. A Somersetshire gentleman of good birth and competent 
fortune, he entered on public life in the Parliament of 1614, and 
was imprisoned for his patriotism at its close. He had been a 
leading member in that of 1620, and one of the "twelve embassa- 
dors" for Avhora James ordered chairs to be set at Whitehall. 
Of the band of patriots with Avhom he had stood side by side in 
the constitutional struggle against the earlier despotism of Charles 
he was the sole survivor. Coke had died of old age ; Cotton's 
heart was broken by oppression ; Eliot had perished in the Tower; 
Wentworth had apostatized. Pym alone remained, resolute, pa- 
tient as of old ; and as the sense of his greatness grew silently 
during the eleven years of deepening tyranny, the hope and faith 
of better things clung almost passionately to the man who never 
doubted of the final triumph of freedom and the laAv. At their 
close. Clarendon tells us, in words all the more notable for their 
bitter tone of hate, " he was the most popular man, and the most 
able to do hurt, that have lived at any time." He had shown he 
knew how to wait, and when waiting was over he showed he knew 
hoAV to act. On the eve of the Long Parliament he rode through 
England to quicken the electors to a sense of the crisis which had 
come at last; and on the assembling of the Commons he took his 
place, not merely as member for Tavistock, but as their acknowl- 
edged head. Few of the country gentlemen, indeed, who formed 
the bulk of the members, had sat in any previous House ; and of 
the few, none represented in so eminent a way the Parliamenta- 
ry tradition on which the coming struggle Avas to turn, Pym's 
eloquence, inferior in boldness and originality to that of Eliot or 
Wentworth, was better suited by its massive and logical force to 
convince and guide a great party ; and it was backed by a calm- 
ness of temjDcr, a dexterity and order in the management of public 
business, and a practical power of shaping the course of debate, 
which gave a form and method to Parliamentary proceedings such 
as they had never had before. Valuable, however, as these quali- 
ties were, it was a yet higher quality which raised Pym into the 
greatest, as he was the first, of Parliamentary leaders. Of the five 
hundred members who sat around him at St. Stephen's, he was the 
one man who had clearly foreseen, and as clearly resolved how to 
meet, the difiiculties which lay before them. It was certain that 
Parliament Avould be drawn into a struggle with the Crown. It 
was probable that in such a struggle the House of Commons would 
be hampered, as it had been hampered before, by the House of 
Lords. The legal antiquarians of the older constitutional school 
stood helpless before such a conflict of co-ordinate powers, a con- 
flict for which no provision had been made by the law, and on 
which precedents threw only a doubtful and conflicting light. 
But with a knowledge of precedent as great as their own, Pym 
rose high above them in his grasp of constitutional princijDles. He 
was the first English statesman who discovered, and applied to 
the political circumstances around him, what may be called the 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



523 



doctrine of constitutional proportion. He saw that as an element 
of constitutional life P9,rliament was of higher value than the 
Crown ; he saw, too, that in Parliament itself the one essential 
part was the House of Commons. On these two facts he based 
his whole policy in the contest which followed. When Charles 
refused to act with the Parliament, Pym treated the refusal as a 
temporary abdication on the part of the sovereign, which vested 
the executive power in the two Houses until new arrangements 
were made. When the Lords obstructed public business, he 
warned them that obstruction would only force the Commons " to 
save the kingdom alone." Revolutionary as these principles 
seemed at the time, they have both been recognized as bases of 
our constitution since the days of Pym. The first principle was 
established by the Convention and Pai'liament which followed on 
the departure of .Tames the Second ; the second by the acknowl- 
edgment on all sides since the Reform Bill of 1832 that the gov- 
ernment of the country is really in the hands of the House of Com- 
mons, and can only be carried on by ministers who represent the 
majority of that House. Pym's temper, indeed, was the very op- 
posite of the temper of a revolutionist. Few natures have ever 
been wider in their range of sympathy or action. Serious as his 
purpose was, his manners were genial, and even courtly : he turned 
easily from an invective against Strafford to a chat with Lady 
Cai'lisle ; and the grace and gayety of his social tone, even when 
the care and weight of public affairs were bringing him to his 
grave, gave rise to a hundred silly scandals among the prurient 
Royalists. It was this striking combination of genial versatility 
with a massive force in his nature which marked him out from the 
first moment of power as a born ruler of men. He proved himself 
at once the subtlest of diplomatists and the grandest of dema- 
gogues. Pie was equally at home in tracking the subtle intrica- 
cies of the Army Plot, or in kindling popular passion with words 
of fire. Though past middle life when his work really began, for 
he was born in 1584, four years before the coming of the Armada, 
he displayed from the first meeting of the Long Parliament the 
qualities of a great administrator, an immense faculty for labor, a 
genius for organization, patience, tact, a power of inspiring confi- 
dence in all whom he touched, calmness and moderation under 
good fortune or ill, an immovable courage, an iron will. ISTo En- 
glish ruler has ever shown greater nobleness of natural temper or 
a wider capacity for government than the Somersetshire squire 
whom his enemies, made clear-sighted by their hate, greeted truly 
enough as "King Pym." 

His ride over England on the eve of the elections had been hard- 
ly needed, for the summons of a Parliament at once woke the king- 
dom to a fresh life. The Puritan emigration to New England was 
suddenly and utterly suspended; "the change," said Winthrop, 
" made all men to stay in England in expectation of a new world." 
The public discontent spoke from every Puritan pulpit, and ex- 
pressed itself in a sudden burst of pamphlets, the first-fruits of the 
thirty thousand which were issued before the Restoration, and 



524 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



which turned England at large into a school of political discussion. 
The resolute looks of the members as they gathered at Westmin- 
ster contrasted with the hesitating words of the King, and each 
brought from borough or county a petition of grievances. Fresh 
petitions were brought every day by bands of citizens or farmers. 
Forty committees were appointed to examine and report on them, 
and their reports formed the grounds on which the Commons 
acted. One by one the illegal acts of the Tyranny Avere annulled. 
Prynne and his fellow " martyrs," recalled from their prisons, en- 
tered London in triumph amid the shouts of a great multitude 
who strewed laurel in their path. The civil and criminal jurisdic- 
tion of the Privy Council, the Star-Chamber, the court of High 
Commission, the irregular jurisdictions of the Council of the North, 
of the Duchy of Lancaster, the County of Chestei-, and a crowd of 
lesser tribunals, were summarily abolished. Ship-money was de- 
clared illegal, and the judgment in Hampden's case annulled. A 
statute declaring " the ancient right of the subjects of this kingdom 
that no subsidy, custom, import, or any charge whatsoever, ought 
or may be laid or imposed upon any merchandize exported or im- 
ported by subjects, denizens, or aliens, without common consent 
in Parliament," put an end forever to all pretensions to a right of 
arbitrary taxation on the part of the Crown. A Triennial Bill en- 
forced the assembly of the Houses every three years, and bound 
the sheriffs and citizens to proceed to election if the Royal writ 
failed to summon them. Charles protested, but gave way. He 
was forced to look helplessly on at the wreck of his Tyrannj-, for 
the Scotch army was still encamped in the north; and the Parlia- 
ment, which saw in the presence of the Scots a security against its 
own dissolution, was in no hurry to vote the. money necessary for' 
their withdrawal. " We can not do without them," Strode hon- 
estly confessed — " the Philistines are still too strong for us." Mean- 
while the Commons were dealing roughly with the agents of the 
Royal system. In every county a list of the Royal officers, under 
the name of '* delinquents," was ordered to be jDrepared and laid 
before the Houses. Windebank, the Secretary of State, with the 
Chancellor, Finch, fled in terror over sea. Laud himself was flung 
into jDrison. The shadow perhaps of what was to come falls across 
the pages of his Diary, and softens the hard temper of the man 
into a strange tenderness. "I stayed at Lambeth till the even- 
ing," writes the Archbishop, " to avoid the gaze of the people. I 
went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the day, and 
chapter fifty of Isaiah, gave me great comfort. God make me 
worthy of it and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge hun- 
dreds of my poor neighbors stood there, and prayed for my safety 
and return to my house. For which I bless God and them." 

But even Laud, hateful as he was to all but the poor neighbors 
whose prayers his alms had won, was not the centre of so great 
and universal a hatred as the Earl of Strafibrd. Strafibrd's guilt 
was more than the guilt of a servile instrument of tyranny — it was 
the guilt of " that grand apostate to the Commonwealth who," in 
the terrible words which closed Lord Digby's invective, " must 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



525 



not expect to be pardoned in this world till he be dispatched to 
the other." He was conscious of his danger, but Charles forced 
him to attend the Court; and with characteristic boldness he re- 
solved to anticipate attack by charging the Parliamentary leaders 
with a treasonable correspondence with the Scots. He was just 
laying his scheme before Charles when the news reached him that 
Pym was at the bar of the Lords with his impeachment for High- 
Treason. " With speed," writes an eye-witness, " he comes to the 
House : he calls rudely at the door," and, " with a proud, glooming 
look, makes toward his place at the board -head. But at once 
many bid him void the House, so he is forced in confusion to go 
to the door till he was called." He was only recalled to hear his 
committal to the Tower, He was still resolute to retort the charge 
of treason on his foes, and "offered to speak, but was commanded 
to be gone without a word." The keeper of the Black Rod de- 
manded his sword as he took him in charge. "This done, he 
makes through a number of people toward his coach, no man cap- 
ping to him, before whom that morning the greatest of all England 
would have stood uncovered." The effect of the blow Avas seen 
in the cessation on the King's part of his old tone of command, 
and in the attempt he made to construct a ministry from among 
the patriots, with Lord Bedford at their head, on condition that 
Strafford's life should be spared. But the price was too high to 
pay; the negotiations were interrupted by Bedford's death, and 
by the discovery that Charles had been listening all the while to 
a knot of adventurers who proposed to bring about his end by 
stirring the army to an attack on the Parliament. The discovery 
of the Army Plot sealed Strafford's fate. The trial of his Impeach- 
ment began in Westminster Hall, and the House of Commons ap- 
peared to support it. The passion Avhich the cause excited was 
seen in the loud cries of sympathy or hatred which burst from the 
crowded benches on either side. For fifteen days Strafford strug- 
gled with a remarkable courage and ingenuity against the list of 
charges, and he had melted his audience to tears by the pathos of 
his defense when the trial was suddenly interrupted. Though 
tyranny and misgovernment had been conclusively proved against 
him, the technical proof of treason was weak. " The law of En- 
gland," to use Hallam's words, " is silent as to conspiracies against 
itself," and treason by the Statute of Edward the Third was re- 
stricted to a levying of war against the King or a compassing of 
liis death. The Commons endeavored to strengthen their case by 
bringing forward the notes of a meeting of the Council in which 
Strafford had urged the use of his Irish troops " to reduce this 
kingdom to obedience ;" but the words were still technically doubt- 
ful, and the Lords would only admit the evidence on condition of 
wholly reopening the case. Pym and Hampden remained con- 
vinced of the sufficiency of the impeachment ; but the House broke 
loose from their control, and, guided by St. John and Lord Falk- 
land, resolved to abandon these judicial proceedings, and fall back 
on the resource of a Bill of Attainder. Their course has been bit- 
terly censured by some whose oi^inion in such a matter is entitled 



526 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



to respect. But the crime of Strafford was none the less a crime 
that it did not fall within the scope of the Statute of Treasons. It 
is impossible, indeed, to provide for some of the greatest dangers 
which can happen to national freedom by any formal statute. 
Even now a minister might avail himself of the temper of a Par- 
liament elected in some moment of popular panic, and, though the 
nation returned to its senses, might, simply by refusing to appeal 
to the country, govern in defiance of its will. Such a course would 
be technically legal, but such a minister would be none the less a 
criminal. Strafford's course, whether it fell within the Statute of 
Treasons or not, was from beginning to end an attack on the free- 
dom of the whole nation. In the last resort a nation retains the 
right of self defense, and the Bill of Attainder is the assertion of 
such a right for the punishment of a public enemy who falls with- 
in the scope of no written law. The chance of the offender's es- 
cape roused the Londoners to frenzy, and crowds surrounded the 
Houses, with cries of "Justice," while the Lords passed the Bill. 
The Earl's one hope was in the King, but three days later the 
Royal sanction was' given, and he passed to his doom. Strafford 
died as he had lived. His friends warned him of the vast multi- 
tude gathered before the Tower to witness his fall. "I know how 
to look death in the face, and the people too," he answered, proud- 
ly. " I thank God I am no more afraid of death, but as cheerfully 
put off my doublet at this time as ever I did when I went to bed." 
As the axe fell, the silence of the great multitude was broken by 
a universal shout of joy. The streets blazed with bonfires. The 
bells clashed out from every steeple. " Many," says an observer, 
" that came to tOAvn to see the execution rode in triumph back, 
waving their hats, and, with all expressions of joy through every 
town they went, crying, 'His head is off! His head is off!' " 

Great as were the changes which had been wrought in the first 
six months of the Long Parliament, they had been based strictly 
on precedent, and had, in fact, been simply a restoration of the 
older English constitution as it existed at the close of the Wars 
of the Roses. But every day made it harder to remain quietly 
in this position. On the one hand, the air, since the army con- 
spiracy, was full of rumors and panic ; the creak of a few boards 
revived the memory of the Gunpowder Plot, and the members 
rushed out of the House of Commons in the full belief that it was 
undermined. On the other hand, Charles regarded his consent to 
the new measures as having been extorted by force, and to be re- 
tracted at the first opportunity. Both Houses, in their terror, 
swore to defend the Protestant religion and the public liberties, 
an oath which was subsequently exacted from every one engaged 
in civil employment, and voluntarily taken by the great mass of 
the people. The same terror of a counter-revolution induced 
Hyde and the " moderate men " in the Commons to bring in a 
Bill providing that the present Parliament should not be dissolved 
but by its own consent. Charles signed the Bill without protest, 
but he was already seeking aid from France, and preparing for 
the counter-revolution it was meant to meet. Hitherto the Scotch 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



52: 



army had held him do^yn, but its payment and withdrawal could 
no longer be delayed, and it was no sooner on its way homeward 
than the King resolved to prevent its return. In spite of pray- 
ers from the Parliament, he left London for Edinburgh, yielded 
to every demand of the Assembly and the Scotch Estates, attended 
the Presbyterian worship, lavished titles and favors on the Earl 
of Argyle and the patriot leaders, and gained for a few months 
a popularity which spread dismay in the English Parliament. 
Their dread of his designs was increased when he was found to 
have been intriguing all the while with the Earl of Montrose — 
who had seceded from the patriot party before his coming, and 
been rewarded for his secession with imprisonment in the castle 
of Edinburgh — and when Hamilton and Argyle withdrew sud- 
denly from the capital, and charged the King with a treacherous 
plot to seize and carry them out of the realm. The popular 
fright was fanned to frenzy by news which came suddenly from 
Ireland, where the fall of Strafford had put an end to all sem- 
blance of rule. The disbanded soldiers of the army he had raised 
spread over the country, and stirred the smouldering disaffection 
into a flame, A conspiracy, organized with wonderful power and 
secrecy, burst forth in Ulster, where the confiscation of the Settle- 
ment had never been forgiven, and spread like wildfire over the 
centre and west of the island. Dublin was saved by a mere 
chance ; but in the open country the work of murder went on 
nnchecked. Fifty thousand English people perished in a few 
days, and rumor doubled and trebled the number. Tales of hor- 
ror and outrage, such as maddened our own England when they 
reached us from Cawnpore, came day after day over the Irish 
Channel. Sworn depositions told how husbands were cut to pieces 
in presence of their wives, their children's brains dashed out be- 
fore their faces, their daughters brutally violated and driven out 
naked to perish frozen in the woods. " Some," says May, " were 
burned on set purpose, others drowned for sport or pastime, and, 
if they swam, kept from landing with poles, or shot or murdered 
in the water; many were buried quick, and some set into the 
earth breast-high, and there left to famish." The new feature of 
the revolt, besides the massacre with which it opened, was its re- 
ligious character. It was no longer a struggle, as of old, of Celt 
against Saxon, but of Catholic against Protestant. The Papists 
within the Pale joined hands in it with the wild kerns outside the 
Pale. The rebels called themselves " Confederate Catholics," re- 
solved to defend " the public and free exercise of the true and 
Catholic Roman religion." The panic waxed greater when it 
was found that they claimed to be acting by the King's com- 
mission, and in aid of his authority. They professed to stand 
by Charles and his heirs against all that should " directly and 
indirectly endeavor to suppress their Royal prerogatives." They 
showed a Commission, purporting to have been issued by Royal 
command at Edinburgh, and styled themselves "the King's army." 
The Commission was a forgery, but belief in it was quickened by 
the want of all sympathy with the national honor which Charles 

34 



528 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



displayed. To him the revolt seemed a useful check on his op- 
ponents. "I hope," he wrote coolly, when the news reached 
him, " this ill news of Ireland may hinder some of these follies 
in England." Above all, it would necessitate the raising of an 
army, and with an army at his command he would again be the 
master of the Parliament. The Parliament, on the other hand, 
saw in the Irish revolt the disclosure of a vast scheme for a 
counter-revolution, of which the withdrawal of the Scotch army, 
the reconciliation of Scotland, the intrigues at Edinbui'gh, the 
exultation of the Royalists at the King's return, and the appear- 
ance of a Royalist party in the House itself, were all parts. At 
the head of the new party stood Lord Falkland, a man learned 
and accomplished, the centre of a circle which embraced the most 
libei'al thinkers of his day, a keen reasoner and able speaker, whose 
convictions still went with the Parliament, while his wavering and 
impulsive temper, his love of the Church, which was now being 
threatened, his passionate longings for peace, his sympathy for 
the fallen, led him to struggle for a King whom he distrusted, 
and to die in a cause that was not his own. Behind him clus- 
tered intriguers like Hyde, chivalrous soldiers like Sir Edmund 
Verney (" I have eaten the King's bread and served him now 
thirty years, and I will not do so base a thing as to distrust 
him"), men frightened at the rapid march of change, or by the 
dangers which threatened Episcopacy. With a broken Parlia- 
ment, and perils gathering without, Pym resolved to appeal for 
aid to the nation itself. The Solemn Remonstrance which he 
laid before the Plouse was a detailed narrative of the work which 
the Parliament had done, the difficulties it had surmounted, and 
the new dangers which lay in its path. The Parliament had been 
charged with a design to abolish Episcopacy, it declared its pur- 
pose to be simply that of reducing the power of Bishops, Po- 
litically it repudiated the taunt of revolutionary aims. It de- 
manded only the observance of the existing laws against Papist- 
ry, securities for the due administration of justice, and the em- 
ployment of ministers who possessed the confidence of Parlia- 
ment. The new King's party fought fiercely, debate followed 
debate, the sittings were prolonged till, for the first time in the 
history of the House, lights had to be brought in ; and it was 
only at midnight, and by a majority of eleven, that the Remon- 
strance was finally adopted, after a scene of unexampled violence. 
On an attempt of the minority to ofier a formal protest the slum- 
bering passion burst into a flame. " Some waved their hats 
over their heads, and others took their swords in their scabbards 
out of their belts, and held them by the pommels in their hands, 
setting the lower part on the ground." Only Hampden's cool- 
ness and tact averted a conflict. The Remonstrance was felt on 
both sides to be a crisis in the struggle. " Had it been rejected," 
said Cromwell, as he left the House, " I would have sold to-mor- 
row all I possess, and left England forever." Listened to sul- 
lenly by the King, it kindled afresh the spirit of the country : 
London swore to live and die with the Parliament ; associations 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



529 



were formed in every county for the defense of the Houses ; and 
when the guard which Lord Essex had given them was with- 
drawn by the King, the populace crowded down to Westminster 
to take its place. 

Tlie question which had above all broken the unity of the Par- 
liament had been the question of the Church. All were agreed 
on the necessity of its reform, for the Laudian party of High 
Churchmen were rendered powerless by the course of events ; 
and one of the first acts of the Parliament had been to appoint 
a Committee of Religion for this purpose. Within, as without 
the House, the general opinion was in favor of a reduction of 
the power and wealth of the Church, without any radical change 
in its constitution. Even among the bishops themselves, the 
more prominent saw the need for consenting to the abolition of 
Chapters and Bishops' Courts, as well as to the creation of a 
council of ministers in each diocese, which had been suggested 
by Archbishop Usher as a check on episcopal autocracy. A 
scheme to this effect was drawn up by Bishop Williams of Lin- 
coln ; but it Avas far from meeting the wishes of the general body 
of the Commons. Pym and Lord Falkland demanded, in addition 
to these changes, a severance of the clergy from all secular or 
State offices, and an expulsion of the bishops from the House of 
Lords. The last demand was backed by a petition from seven 
hundred ministers of the Church ; but the strife between the 
two sections of episcopal reformers gave strength to the grow- 
ing party, who demanded the abolition of Episcopacy altogether. 
The doctrines of Cartwright had risen into popularity under the 
persecution of Laud, and Presbyterianism was now a formida- 
ble force among the middle classes. Its chief strength lay in the 
eastern counties and in London, where a few ministers, such as 
Calamy and Marshall, had formed a committee for its diffusion ; 
while in Parliament it was represented by Lord Brooke, Lord 
Maudeville, and Lord Saye and Sele. In the Commons Sir Harry 
Vane represented a more extreme party of reformers, the Inde- 
pendents of the future, whose sentiments were little less hostile 
to Presbyterianism than to Episcopacy, but who acted with the 
Presbyterians for the present, and formed a part of what became 
known as the " Root and Branch party," from its demand for the 
extirpation of Prelacy. The attitude of Scotland in the great 
struggle with tyranny, and the political advantage of a religious 
union between the two kingdoms, as well as the desire to knit 
the English Church more closely to the general body of Protest- 
antism, gave fresh force to the Presbyterian scheme. Milton, 
who after the composition of his "Lycidas" had spent a year in 
foreign travel, but had been called home from Italy by the open- 
ing of the Parliament, threw himself hotly into the theological 
strife. He held it "an unjust thing that the English should dif- 
fer from all Churches as many as be reformed." In spite of this 
pressure, however, and of a Petition from London with fifteen 
thousand signatures to the same purport, the Committee of Re- 
ligion reported in favor of the moderate reforms suggested by 



530 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Falkland and Pym ; and the first of these was embodied by the 
former in a bill for the expulsion of bishops from the House of 
Peers, which passed the Commons almost unanimously. Rejected 
by the Lords on the eve of the King's journey to Scotland, it was 
again introduced on his return ; but, in spite of violent remon- 
strances from the Commons, the bill still hung fire among the 
Peers. The delay roused the excited crowd of Londoners who 
gathered around Whitehall ; the bishops' carriages were stopped ; 
and the prelates themselves rabbled on their way to the House. 
The angry pride of Williams induced ten of his fellow-bishops 
to declare themselves prevented from attendance in Parliament, 
and to protest against all acts done in their absence as null and 
void. The Protest was met at once on the part of the Peers by 
the committal of the prelates who had signed it to the Towei'. 
But the contest gave a powerful aid to the projects of the King. 
The courtiers declared openly that the rabbling of the bishops 
proved that there w?.s "no free Parliament," and strove to bring- 
about fresh outrages by gathering troops of officers and soldiers 
of fortune, who were seeking for employment in the L-ish war, 
and pitting them against the crowds at Whitehall. The brawls 
of the two parties, who gave each other the nicknames of "Round- 
heads" and "Cavaliers," created fresh alarm in the Parliament; 
but Charles persisted in refusing it a guard. " On the honor of 
a King," he engaged to defend them from violence as completely 
as his own children ; but the answer had hardly been given when 
his Attorney appeared at the bar of the Lords, and accused 
Hampden, Pym, Hollis, Strode, and Haslerig of high -treason in 
their correspondence with the Scots. A herald at arms appeared 
at the bar of the Commons, and demanded the surrender of the 
five members. All constitutional law was set aside by a charge 
which proceeded personally from the King, which deprived the 
accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and sum- 
moned them before a tribunal which had no pretense to a juris- 
diction over them. The Commons simply promised to take the 
demand into consideration, and again requested a guard. " I will 
reply to-morrow," said the King. On the morrow he summon- 
ed three hundred gentlemen to follow him, and, embracing the 
Queen, promised her that in an hour he would return master of 
his kingdom. A mob of Cavaliers joined him as he left the palace, 
and remained in Westminster Hall as Charles, accompanied by his 
nephew, the Elector-Palatine, entered the House of Commons. 
" Mr. Speaker," he said, " I must for a time borrow your chair !" 
He paused Avith a sudden confusion as his eye fell on the vacant 
spot where Pym commonly sat : for at the news of his approach 
the House had ordered the five members to withdraw. " Gentle- 
men," he began in slow, broken sentences, " I am sorry for this 
occasion of coming unto you. Yesterday I sent a Sergeant-at- 
arms upon a very important occasion, to apprehend some that by 
my command were accused of high -treason, whereunto I did ex- 
pect obedience, and not a message." Treason, he went on, had 
no privilege, " and therefore I am come to know if any of these 



viir.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



531 



persons that were accused are here." There was a dead silence, 
only broken by his reiterated " I must have them wheresoever I 
find them." He again paused, but the stillness was unbroken. 
Then he called out, " Is Mr. Pym here ?" There was no answer ; 
and Charles, turning to the Speaker, asked him whether the five 
members were there. Lenthall fell on his knees, and replied that 
lie had neither eyes nor tongue to see or say any thing save what 
the House commanded him. " Well, well," Charles angrily re- 
torted, " 'tis no matter. I think my eyes are as good as another's !" 
There was another long pause, while he looked carefully over the 
ranks of members. "I see," he said at last, "my birds are flown, 
but I do expect you will send them to me." If they did not, he 
added, he would seek them himself; and with a closing protest 
that he never intended any force, "he went out of the House," 
says an eye-witness, " in a more discontented and angry passion 
than he came in." 

Nothing but the absence of the five members, and the calm 
dignity of the Commons, had prevented the King's outrage from 
ending in bloodshed. " It was believed," says Whitelock, who 
was present at the scene, " that if the King had found them there, 
and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the 
House would have endeavored the defense of them, which might 
have proved a very unhappy and sad business." Five hundred 
gentlemen of the best blood in England would hardly have stood 
tamely by while the bravoes of Whitehall laid hands on their 
leaders in the midst of the Parliament. But Charles was blind 
to the danger of his new course. The five members had taken 
refuge in the city, and it was there that on the next day the 
King himself demanded their surrender from the aldermen at 
Guildhall. Cries of " Privilege " rang around him as he returned 
through the streets : the writs issued for the arrest of the five 
were disregarded by the sheriffs, and a proclamation issued four 
days later, declaring them traitors, Avas answered by their tri- 
umphant return to St. Stephen's. The trained bands of London 
and Southwark were on foot, and the London watermen, sworn 
" to guard the Parliament, the Kingdom, and the King," escorted 
the five members as they passed along the river to Westminster. 
Terror drove the Cavaliers from Whitehall, and Charles stood ab- 
solutely alone ; for the outrage had severed him for the moment 
from his new friends in the Parliament, and from the ministers, 
Falkland and Colepepper, whom he had chosen among them. 
But, lonely as he was, Charles had resolved on war. The Earl 
of Newcastle was dispatched to muster a Royal force in the 
north ; and as the five members re-entered the House, Charles 
withdrew from Whitehall. Both sides prepared for the coming 
struggle. The Queen sailed from Dover with the crown jewels 
to buy munitions of war. The Cavaliers again gathered around 
the King, and the Royalist press flooded the country with State 
papers drawn up by Hyde. On the other hand, mounted pro- 
cessions of freeholders from Buckinghamshire and Kent traversed 
London on their way to St. Stephen's, vowing to live and die with 



532 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the Parliament. The Tower was blockaded, and the two great 
arsenals, Portsmouth and Hull, secured by Pym's forethought. 
The Lords were scared out of their policy of obstruction by his 
bold announcement of the new position taken by the House of 
Commons. " The Commons," said their leader, " will be glad to 
have your concurrence and help in saving the kingdom ; but if 
they fail of it, it should not discourage them in doing their duty. 
And whether the kingdom be lost or saved, they shall be sorry 
that the story of this present Parliiament should tell posterity 
that in so great a danger and extremity the House of Commons 
should be enforced to save the kingdom alone." The effect of 
Pym's words was seen in the passing of the Bill for excluding 
bishops from the House of Lords. The great point, however, 
was to secure armed support from the nation at large, and here 
both sides were in a dilficulty. Previous to the innovations in- 
troduced by the Tudors, and which had been taken away by the 
Bill against pressing soldiers, the King in himself had no power 
of calling on his subjects generally to bear arms, save for pur- 
poses of restoring order or meeting foreign invasion. On the 
other hand, no one contended that such a power had ever been 
exercised by the two Houses without the King ; and Charles 
steadily refused to consent to the Militia Bill, in which the com- 
mand of the national force was given in every county to men 
devoted to. the Parliamentary cause. Both parties therefore broke 
through constitutional precedent, the Parliament in appointing 
Lord Lieutenants of the Militia by ordinance of the two Houses, 
Charles in levying forces by Royal commissions of array. The 
King's great difficulty lay in procuring arms, and at the end of 
April he suddenly appeared before Hull, the magazine of the 
north, and demanded admission. The new governor. Sir John 
Hotham, fell on his knees, but refused to open the gates ; and 
the avowal of his act by the Parliament was followed by the 
withdrawal of the new Royalist party among its members from 
their seats at Westminster. Falkland, Colepepper, and Hyde, 
with thirty-two peers and sixty members of the House of Com- 
mons, joined Charles at York ; and Lyttelton, the Lord Keeper, 
followed with the Great Seal. But tlae King's warlike projects 
were still checked by the general opposition of the country. A 
great meeting of the Yorkshire freeholders which he convened 
on Heyworth Moor ended in a petition praying him to be recon- 
ciled to the Parliament, and, in spite of gifts of plate from the 
Universities and nobles of his party, arms and money were still 
wanting for his new levies. The two Houses, on the other hand, 
gained in unity and vigor by the Avithdrawal of the Royalists. 
The Militia was rapidly enrolled. Lord Warwick named to the 
command of the fleet, and a loan opened in the city, to which the 
women brought even their wedding-rings. The tone of the two 
Houses had risen with the threat of force ; and their last pi-oposals 
demanded the powers of appointing and dismissing the Royal 
ministers, naming guardians for the Royal children, and of virtu- 
ally controlling military, civil, and religious affairs. " If I granted 



vm.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



533 



your demands," replied Charles, 
mere phantom of a king." 



I should be no more than the 



Section VII.— Tlie Civil War. July, 1642— Aug., 1646. 

{Authorities. — To those given in the previous section we may add Warburton's 
biography of Prince Eupert, Mr. Clement Markham's admirable life of Fairfax, the 
Fairfax Correspondence, and Ludlow's "Memoirs." Sprigg's " Anglia Rediviva" 
gives the best account of the New Model and its doings. For Cromwell, the prima- 
rv authority is Mr. Carlyle's " Life and Letters," an invaluable store of documents, 
edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a poet. Clarendon, who 
is now of great value, gives a fine account of the Cornish rising.] 



The breaking oif of negotiations was followed on both sides by- 
preparations for immediate war, Hampden, Pym, and Hollis be- 
came the guiding spirits of a Committee of Public Safety which 
was created by Parliament as its administrative organ ; English 
and Scotch officers were drawn from the Low Countries, and Lord 
Essex named commander of an army of twenty thousand foot and 
four thousand hoi'se. The confidence on the Parliamentary side 
was great : " Ave all thought one battle would decide," Baxter con- 
fessed after the first encounter ; for the King was almost destitute 
of money and arms, and, in spite of his strenuous efforts to raise re- 
cruits, he was embarrassed by the reluctance of his own adherents 
to begin the struggle. Resolved, however, to force on a contest, 
he raised the Royal Standard at ISTottinghani " on the evening of 
a very stormy and tempestuous day," but the country made no an- 
swer to his appeal ; while Essex, who had quitted London amid 
the shouts of a great multitude, with orders from the Parliament to 
follow the King, " and by battle or other way rescue him from his 
perfidious councilors and restore him to Parliament," mustered his 
army at Northampton. Charles had but a handful of men, and 
the dash of a few regiments of horse would have ended the war ; 
but Essex shrank from a decisive stroke, and trusted to reduce 
Charles to submission by a show of force. No sooner, however, 
had the King fallen back on Shrewsbury than the whole face of af- 
fairs suddenly changed. Catholics and Royalists rallied fast to his 
standard, and a bold march on London drew Essex from his inac- 
tivity at Worcester to protect the capital. The two armies fell in 
with one another on the field of Edgehill, near Banbury. The en- 
counter was a surprise, and the battle which followed was little 
more than a confused combat of horse. At its outset the deser- 
tion of Sir Faithful Fortescue, with a whole regiment, threw the 
Parliamentary forces into disorder, w^hile the Royalist horse on 
either wing drove their opponents from the field ; but the reserve 
of Lord Essex broke the Royalist foot, which formed the centre of 
the King's line, and though his nephew, Prince Rupert, brought 
back his squadrons in time to save Charles from capture or flight, 
the night fell on a drawn battle. The moral advantage, however, 
rested with the King. Essex had learned that his troopers were 



i3-t 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



no match for the Cavaliers, and his withdrawal to Warwick left 
open the road to the capital, Rupert pressed for an instant march 
on London, but the proposal found stubborn opponents among the 
moderate Royalists, who dreaded the complete triumph of Charles 
as much as his defeat. The King therefore paused for the time at 
Oxford, where he was received with uproarious welcome; and 
when the cowardice of its garrison delivered Reading to Rupert's 
horse, and his daring capture of Brentford drew the Royal army 
in his support almost to the walls of the capital, the panic of the 
Londoners was already over, and the junction of their train-bands 
with the army of Essex forced Charles to fall back again on his old 
quarters. But though Parliament rallied quickly from the blow 
of Edgehill, the war, as its area widened through the winter, went 
steadily for the King. The fortification of Oxford gave him a firm 
hold on the midland counties; while the balance of the two par- 
ties in the north was overthrown by the mai'ch of the Earl of New- 
castle, with the force he had raised in Northumberland, upon York. 
Lord Fairfax, the Parliamentary leader in that county, was thrown 
back on the manufacturing towns of the West Riding, where Pu- 
ritanism found its stronghold; and the arrival of the Queen with 
arms from Holland encouraged the Royal army to push its scouts 
across the Trent, and threaten the eastern counties, which held 
firmly for the Parliament. The stress of the war was shown by the 
vigorous exertions of the two Houses. The negotiations which 
had gone on into the spring were broken off by the old demand 
that the King should return to his Parliament ; London was forti- 
fied ; and a tax of two millions a year was laid on the districts 
which adhered to the Parliamentary cause. Essex, whose army 
had been freshly equipped, was ordered to advance upon Oxfoi'd ; 
but though the King held himself ready to fall back on the west, 
the Earl shrank from again risking his raw army in an encounter. 
He confined himself to the recapture of Reading, and to a month 
of idle encampment around Brill, while disease thinned his ranks 
and the Royalists beat up his quarters. 

While Essex lingered and manoeuvred, Charles boldly detached 
a part of his small force at Oxford to strengthen a Royalist rising 
in the west. Nowhere was the Royal cause to take so brave or 
noble a form as among the Coruishmen. Cornwall stood apart 
from the general life of England : cut off from it not only by dif- 
ferences of blood and speech, but by the feudal tendencies of its 
people, who clung with a Celtic loyalty to their local chieftains, 
and suffered their fidelity to the Crown to determine their own. 
They had as yet done little more than keep the war out of their 
own county ; but the march of a small Parliamentary force under 
Lord Stamford upon Launceston forced them into action. A little 
band of Cornishmen gathered around the chivalrous Sir Bevil Green- 
vil, " so destitute of provisions that the best officei'S had but a bis- 
cuit a day," and with only a handful of powder for the whole force ; 
but starving and outnumbered as they were, they scaled the steep 
rise of Stratton Hill, sword in hand, and drove Stamford back on 
Exeter, witli a loss of two thousand men, his ordnance and bag- 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



535 



o-ao;e train. Sh* Ralph Hopton, the best of the Royalist generals, 
took the command of their array as it advanced into Somerset, and 
drew the stress of the war into the west. Essex dispatched a 
picked force under Sir William Waller to check their advance ; 
but Somerset was already lost ere he reached Bath, and the Corn- 
ishmen stormed his strong position on Lansdowne Hill in the teeth 
of his guns. But the stubborn fight robbed the victors of their 
leaders : Hopton was wounded, Greenvil slain, and with them fell 
the two heroes of the little army, Sir Nicholas Slanning and Sir 
John Trevanion, " both young, neither of them above eight and 
twenty, of entire friendship to one another, and to Sir Bevil Green- 
vil." Waller, beaten as he was, hung on their weakened force as 
it moved for aid upon Oxford, and succeeded in cooping up the foot 
in Devizes. But the horse broke through, and joining an army 
which had been sent to their relief under Wilmot, afterward Lord 
Rochester, turned back, and dashed Waller's army to pieces in a 
fresh victory on Roundway Down. The Cornish rising seemed to 
have turned the tide of the war. Strengthened by their earlier 
successes, and by the succors which his Queen brought from the 
north, Charles had already prepared to advance, when Rupert, 
in a daring raid upon Wycombe, met a party of Parliamentary 
horse, with Hampden at its head, on Chalgrove field. The skir- 
mish ended in the success of the Royalists, and Hampden was seen 
riding off the field "before the action was done, which he never 
used to do, and with his head hanging down, and resting his hands 
upon the neck of his horse." He was mortally wounded, and his 
death seemed an omen of the ruin of the cause he loved. Disaster 
followed disaster. Essex, more and more anxious for peace, fell 
back on Uxbridge ; while a cowardly surrender of Bristol to Prince 
Rupert gave Charles the second city of the kingdom, and the mas- 
tery of the west. The news fell on the Parliament " like a sentence 
of death." The Lords debated nothing but proposals of peace. 
London itself was divided ; " a great multitude of the wives of 
substantial citizens" clamored at the door of the Commons for 
peace ; and a flight of six of the few peers who remained at West- 
minster to the camp at Oxford proved the general despair of the 
Parliament's success. 

From this moment, however, the firmness of the Parliamentary 
leaders began slowly to reverse the fortunes of the war. Waller 
was received on his return from Roundway Hill " as if he had 
brought the King prisoner with him." A new army was placed 
imder the command of Lord Manchester to check the progress of 
Newcastle. In the west, indeed, things still went badly. Prince 
Maurice continued Rupert's career of success, and the conquest of 
Barnstaple and Exeter secured Devon for the King. Gloucester 
alone interrupted the communications between his forces in Bris- 
tol and in the north ; and Charles moved against the city, Avith 
hope of a speedy surrender. But the gallant resistance of the 
town called Essex to its relief. It was reduced to a single barrel 
of powder when the Earl's approach forced Charles to raise tlie 
siege; and the Puritan army fell steadily back again on London, 



536 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



after an indecisive engagement neai' ISTewbury, in which Lord 
Falkland fell, " ingeminating ' Peace, peace !' " and the London 
train-bands flung Rupert's horsemen roughly oif their front of 
pikes. Li this posture of his affairs nothing but a great victory 
could have saved the King, for the day which witnessed the tri- 
umphant return of Essex witnessed the solemn taking of the Cov- 
enant. Pym had resolved, at last, to fling the Scotch sword into 
the wavering balance ; and in the darkest hour of the Parliament's 
cause Sir Harry Vane had been dispatched to Edinburgh to ar- 
range the terms on which the aid of Scotland would be given. 
First among them stood the demand of a " unity in Religion :" 
an adoption, in other words, of the Presbyterian system by the 
Church of England. Events had moved so rapidly since the ear- 
lier debates on Church government in the Commons that some ar- 
rangement of this kind had become a necessity. The bishops to a 
man, and the bulk of the clergy whose bent was purely episcopal, 
had joined the Royal cause, and were being expelled from their 
livings as " delinquents." Some new system of Church govern- 
ment was imperatively called for by the religious necessities of 
the country ; and, though Pym and the leading statesmen were 
still in opinion moderate Episcopalians, the growing force of Pres- 
byterianism, as well as the needs of the war, forced them to seek 
such a system in the adoption of the Scotch discipline. Scotland, 
for its part, saw that the triumph of the Parliament was necessary 
for its own security; and whatever difiiculties stood in the way 
of Vane's wary and rapid negotiations were removed by the poli- 
cy of the King. While the Parliament looked for aid to the north, 
Charles had long been seeking assistance from the Lish rebels. 
The Massacre had left them the objects of a vengeful hate such as 
England had hardly known before, but with Charles they were 
simply counters in his game of king-ci'aft. The conclusion of a 
truce with them left the army under Lord Ormond, which had 
hitherto held their revolt in check, at the King's disj^osal for serv- 
ice in England; and at the same moment he secured a force of 
Irish Catholics to support by their landing in Argyleshire a rising 
of the Highlands under Montrose, which aimed at the overthrow of 
the government at Edinburgh. None of the King's schemes proved 
so fatal to his cause as these. On their discovery, officer after of- 
ficer in his own army flung down their commissions, the peers who 
had fled to Oxford fled back again to London, and the Royalist 
reaction in the Parliament itself came utterly to an end. Scotland, 
anxious for its own safety, hastened to sign the Covenant ; and the 
Commons, " with uplifted hands," swore in St. Margaret's church 
to observe it. They pledged themselves to " bring the Churches 
of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uni- 
formity in religion, confession of faith, form of Church govern- 
ment, direction for worship, and catechizing ; that we and our 
posterity after us may as brethren live in faith and love, and the 
Lord may delight to live in the midst of us :" to extirpate pop- 
ery, prelacy, superstition, schism, and profaneness; to "jDreserve 
the rights and privileges of the Parliament and the liberties of 



vni.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



637 



the kingdom ;" to punish malignants and opponents of reformation 
in Church and State ; to " unite the two kingdoms in a firm peace 
and union to all posterity." The Covenant ended with a solemn 
acknowledgment of national sin, and a vow of reformation. " Our 
true, unfeigned purj)Ose, desire, and endeavor for ourselves and all 
others under our power and charge, both in public and private, 
in all duties we owe to God and man, is to amend our lives, and 
each one to go before another in the example of a real reformation." 
The conclusion of the Covenant had been the last work of Pym, 
but it was only a part of the great plan which he had formed, 
and which was carried out by the " Committee of the Two King- 
doms," who were intrusted after his death with the conduct of 
the war and of foreign affairs. Three strong armies, comprising 
a force of fifty thousand men, had been raised for the coming cam- 
paign. Essex, with the army of the centre, was charged with the 
duty of watching the King at Oxford, and following him if he 
moved, as was expected, to the north against the Scots. Waller, 
with the army of the west, was ordered to check Prince Maurice, 
in Dorset and Devon. The force of fourteen thousand men which 
had been raised by the zeal of the eastern counties, and in which 
Cromwell's name was becoming famous as a leader, was raised 
into a third army under Lord Manchester, and directed to co-oper- 
ate in Yorkshire with Sir Thomas Fairfax and the Scots. Charles 
was at once thrown on the defensive. The Irish troops whose aid 
he had secured by his truce with the rebels were cut to pieces soon 
after their arrival in England, those who landed in the south by 
Waller, and their fellows in Cheshire by Sir Thomas Fairfax. The 
hands of the last commander had been freed by the march of IsTew- 
castle to the Border, which the Scots were crossing " in ^ great 
frost and snow;" but after his dispersion of the Irish troops, he at 
once called back his opponent to York by a victory on his return 
over the forces which the Marquis had left to protect the capital. 
The plan of Pym was now rapidly developed. Essex and Waller 
joined in the blockade of Oxford, while Manchester and Fairfax 
united with the Scots under the walls of York. Newcastle's cry 
for aid had already been answered by the dispatch of Prince Rupert 
from Oxford to gather forces on the Welsh border; and the brill- 
iant partisan, after breaking the sieges of Newark and Latham 
Llouse, burst over the Lancashire Hills into Yorkshire, slipped by 
the Parliamentary army, and made his way untouched into York. 
But the success of his feat of arms tempted him to a fresh act of 
daring : he resolved on a decisive battle, and a discharo-e of mus- 
ketry from the two armies as they faced each other on Marston 
Moor brought on, as evening gathered, a disorderly engagement. 
On the one flank a charge of the King's horse broke that of the 
Scotch; on the other, Cromwell's brigade of "Ironsides" won as 
complete a success over Rupert's troopers. " God made them as 
stubble to our swords," wrote the general at the close of tlie day ; 
but in the heat of victory he called back his men from the cliuse 
to back Manchester in his attack on the Royalist foot, and to rout 
their other wing of horse as it returned breathless from pursuing 



538 



HISTORY OF TEE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the Scots. Nowhere had the fighting been so fierce. A young 
Puritan who lay dying on the field told Cromwell as he bent over 
him that one thing lay on his spirit. " I asked him what it was," 
Cromwell wrote afterward. "He told me it was that God had 
not sufiered him to be any more the executioner of his enemies." 
At night-fall all was over; and the Royalist cause in the north 
had perished at a single blow. Newcastle fled over-sea; York 
surrendered, and Rupert, with hardly a man at his back, rode 
southward to Oxford. The blow was the more terrible that it fell 
on Charles at a moment when his triumph in every otlier quarter 
was being secured by a series of brilliant and unexpected success- 
es. After a month's siege the King had escaped from Oxford ; 
had waited till Essex marched into the west ; and then, turning 
fiercely on Waller at Cropredy Bridge, had driven him back 
broken to London, two days before the battle at Marston Moor. 
Charles followed up his success by hurrying in the track of Essex, 
whom he hoped to crush between his own force and that under 
Prince Maurice which the Earl had marched to attack. By a fatal 
error, Essex plunged into Cornwall, where the country was hos- 
tile, and where the King hemmed him in among the hills, drew 
his lines tightly around his army, and forced the whole body of 
the foot to surrender at his mercy, while the horse cut their way 
through the besiegers, and Essex himself fled by sea to London. 
The day of the surrender w^as signalized by a Royalist triumph in 
Scotland which promised to undo what Marston Moor had done. 
The plot which had long since been formed for the conquest of 
Scotland was revived by the landing of L-ish soldiers in Argyle. 
Montrose, throwing himself into the Highlands, called the clans to 
arms ; and flinging his new force on that of the Covenanters at 
Tippermuir, gained a victory Avhich enabled him to occupy Perth, 
to sack Aberdeen, and to spread terror to Edinburgh. The news 
fired Charles, as he came up from the west, to venture on a march 
upon London ; but though the Scots were detained by the siege of 
Newcastle, the rest of the victors at Marston Moor lay in his path 
at Newbury, and their force was strengthened by the army which 
had surrendered in Cornwall, and was again brought into the field. 
The furious charges of the Royalists failed to break the Parlia- 
mentary squadrons, and the soldiers of Essex wiped away the 
shame of their defeat by flinging themselves on the cannon they 
had lost, and bringing them back in triumph to their lines. Crom- 
well seized the moment of victory, and begged hard to be sufiered 
to charge with his single brigade. But Manchester, like Essex, 
shrank from a crowning victory over the King. Charles was al- 
lowed to withdraw his army to Oxford, and even to reappear un- 
checked in the field of his defeat. 

The quarrel of Cromwell with Lord Manchester at Newbury 
was destined to give a new color and direction to the war. Pym, 
in fact, had hardly been borne to his grave in Westminster Abbej'- 
before England instinctively recognized a successor of yet greater 
genius in the victor of Marston Moor. Born in the closing years 
of Elizabeth's reign, the child of a cadet of the great house of the 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



539 



Cromwells of Hinchinbrook, and connected through his mother 
with Hampden and St. John, Oliver had been recalled by his fa- 
ther's death from a short stay at Cambridge to the little family 
estate at Huntingdon, which he quitted for a farm at St. Ives. 
We have already seen his mood during the years of Tyranny, as 
he dwelt in "prolonging" and "blackness" amid fancies of com- 
ing death, the melancholy which formed the ground of his nature 
feeding itself on the inaction of the time. But his energy made 
itself felt the moment the Tyranny was over. His father had sat, 
with three of his uncles, in the later Parliaments of Elizabeth. 
Oliver had himself been returned to that of 1628, and the town 
of Cambridge sent him as its representative to the Short Parlia- 
ment as to the Long. It is in the latter that a courtier. Sir Philip 
Warwick, gives us our first glimpse of his actual appearance : " I 
came into the House one morning, well clad, and perceived a gen- 
tleman speaking Avhom I knew not, very ordinarily appareled, for 
it was a j^lain cloth suit, which seemed to have been made by an 
ill country tailor. His linen was plain, and not very clean ; and I 
remember a speck or two of blood was upon his little band, which 
was not much larger than his collar. His hat was without a hat- 
band. His stature was of a good size ; his sword stuck close to 
his side; his countenance swollen and reddish; his voice sharp 
and untunable, and his eloquence full of fervor." He was al- 
ready " much hearkened unto," but his power was to assert itself 
in deeds rather than in words. He appeared at the head of a 
troop of his own raising at Edgehill ; but with the eye of a born 
soldier he at once saw the blot in the army of Essex. " A set of 
poor tapsters and town apprentices," he Avarned Hampden, " would 
never fight against men of honor ;" and he pointed to religious en- 
thusiasm as the one weapon which could meet and turn the chiv- 
alry of the Cavalier. Even to Hampde-n the plan seemed imprac- 
ticable ; but the regiment of a thousand men which Cromwell 
raised for the Association of the Eastern Counties, and which soon 
became known as his Ironsides, was formed strictly of "men of 
religion." He spent his fortune freely on the task he set him- 
self. "The business . . . hath had of me in money between eleven 
and twelve hundred pounds, therefore my private estate can do 
little to help the public. ... I have little money of my own [left] 
to help my soldiers." But they were "a lovely company," he 
tells his friends with soldierly pride. No blasphemy, drinking, 
disorder, or impiety were suflered in their ranks. "ISTot a man 
swears but he pays his twelve pence." Nor was his choice of 
"men of religion" the only innovation Cromwell introduced into 
his new regiment. The social conditions which restricted com- 
mand to men of birth were disregarded. "It may be," he wrote 
in answer to complaints from the committee of the Association, 
" it provokes your spirit to see such plain men made captains of 
horse. It had been well that men of honor and birth had entered 
into their employments; but why do they not appear? But see- 
ing it. is necessary the work must go on, better plain men than 
none ; but best to have men patient of wants, faithful and consci- 



540 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



entious in their employment, and such, I hope, these will approve 
themselves." The words paint Ci'omwell's temper accurately 
enough : he is far more of the practical soldier than of the theo- 
logical reformer; though his genius already breaks in upon his 
aristocratic and conservative sympathies, and catches glimpses of 
the social revolution to which the war was drifting. "I had 
rather," he once burst out impatiently, " have a plain russet-coat- 
ed captain, that knows what he fights for and loves what he 
knows, than what you call a gentleman, and is nothing else. I 
honor a gentleman that is so indeed" he ends, with a character- 
istic return to his more common mood of feeling. The same prac- 
tical temper broke out in an innovation which had more imme- 
diate results. Bitter as had been his hatred of the bishops, and 
strenuously as he had worked to bring about a change in Church 
government, Cromwell, like most of the Parliamentary leaders, 
seems to have been content with the new Presbyterianism, and 
the Presbyterians were more than content with him. Lord Man- 
chester " suffered him to guide the army at his pleasure." " The 
man, Cromwell," writes the Scotchman Baillie, " is a very wise and 
active head, universally well beloved as religious and stout." 
But against dissidents from their own system, the Presbyterians 
were as bitter as Laud himself; and, as we shall see, Nonconform- 
ity was now rising every day into larger projDortions, while the 
new claim of liberty of worship was becoming one of the prob- 
lems of the time. Cromwell met the j)roblem in his unspecula- 
tive fashion. He wanted good soldiers and good men ; and, if 
they were these, the Lidependent, the Baptist, the Leveler found 
entry among his L'onsides. "You would respect them, did you 
see them," he answered the panic - stricken Presbyterians, Avho' 
charged them with " Anabaptistry " and revolutionary aims ; " they 
are no Anabaptists : they are honest, sober Christians ; they ex- 
pect to be used as men." He was soon to be driven — as in the 
social change we noticed before — to a far larger and grander point 
of view. "The State," he boldly laid down at last, "in choosing 
men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be will- 
ing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies." But as yet he was busier 
with his new regiment than with theories ; and the Ironsides were 
no sooner in action than they proved themselves such soldiers as 
the war had never seen yet. " Truly they were never beaten at 
all," their leader said proudly at its close. At Winceby fight 
they charged "singing psalms," cleared Lincolni^hire of the Cav- 
endishes, and freed the eastern counties from all danger from New- 
castle's part. At Marston Moor they faced and routed Rupert's 
chivalry. At Newbury it was only Manchester's reluctance that 
hindered them from completing the ruin of Charles. 

Cromwell had shown his capacity for organization in the crea- 
tion of the Ironsides; his military genius had displayed itself at 
Marston Moor, Newbury first raised him into a political leader. 
"Without a more speedy, vigorous, and effective prosecution of 
the war," he said to the Commons after his quarrel with Man- 
chester, "casting off all lingering proceedings, like those of sol- 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



641 



diers of fortune beyond sea to spin out a war, we shall make the 
kingdom weary of us, and hate the name of a Parliament." But 
under the leaders who at present conducted it a vigorous conduct 
of the Avar was hopeless. They were, in Cromwell's plain words, 
" afraid to conquer." They desired not to crush Charles, but to 
force him back, with as much of his old strength remaining as 
might be, to the position of a constitutional King, The old loy- 
alty, too, clogged their enterprise ; they shrank from the taint of 
treason. " If the King be beaten," Manchester urged at New- 
bury, " he will still be King ; if he beat us, he will hang us all for 
traitors." To a mood like this Cromwell's reply seemed horrible. 
" If I met the King in battle, I would fire my pistol at the King 
as at another." The army, too, as he long ago urged at Edge- 
hill, was not an array to conquer with. Now, as then, he urged 
that till the whole force was new modeled, and "placed under a 
stricter discipline, " they must not expect any notable success in 
any thing they went about." But the first step in such a reor- 
ganization must be a change of officers. The army was led and 
officered by members of the two Houses, and the Self-renouncing 
Ordinance, which was introduced by Cromwell and Vane, de- 
clared tlie tenure of civil or military offices incompatible with a 
seat in either. In spite of a long and bitter resistance, which was 
justified at a later time by the political results which followed 
this rupture of the tie which had hitherto bound the army to the 
Parliament, the drift of public opinion was too- strong to be with- 
stood. The passage of the Ordinance brought about the retire- 
ment of Essex, Manchester, and Waller; and the new organiza- 
tion of the army went rapidly on under a new commandei'-in- 
chief. Sir Thomas Fairfax, the hero of the long contest in York- 
shire, and who had been I'aised into fame by his victory at Nant- 
wich and his bravery at Marston Moor. The principles on which 
Cromwell had formed his Ironsides were carried out on a larger 
scale in the "New Model." The one aim was to get together 
twenty thousand " honest " men. " Be careful," Cromwell wrote, 
"what captains of horse you choose, what men be mounted. A 
few honest men are better than numbers. If you choose godly, 
honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them." 
The result was a curious medley of men of different ranks among 
the officers of the New Model. The bulk of those in high com- 
mand remained men of noble or gentle blood — Montagues, Pick- 
erings, Fortescues, Sheffields, Sidneys, and the like. But side by 
side with these, though in far smaller proportion, Avere seen officers 
like Ewer, who had been a serving-man, like Okey, Avho had been 
a drayman, or Rainsborough, who had been a " skipper at sea." 
Equally strange was the mixture of religions in its ranks. A clause 
in the Act for new modeling the army had enabled Fairfax to 
dispense with the signature of the Covenant in the case of "godly 
men;" and among the farmers from the eastern counties, who 
formed the bulk of its privates, dissidence of every type had gain- 
ed a firm foothold. A result hardly less notable, though less fore- 
seen, Avas the youth of the officers. Among those in high com- 



542 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



mand there were few who, like Cromwell, had passed middle age. 
Fairfax was but thirty-three, and most of his colonels were even 
younger. Of the political aspect of the New Model we shall have 
to speak at a later time ; but as yet its energy w^as directed solely 
to " the speedy and vigorous prosecution of the war," The efforts 
of the peace party were frustrated at the very moment when 
Fairfax was ready for action by the policy of the King. From 
the moment when Newbury marked the breach between the j)eace 
and war parties in the Parliament, the Scotch Commissioners had 
been backed by the former in pressing for fresh negotiations with 
Charles. These were opened at Uxbridge, and prolonged for six 
months; but the hopes of concession which Charles had held out 
through the winter were suddenly withdrawn in the spring. He 
saw, as he thought, the Parliamentary army dissolved and ruined 
by the new modeling, at the instant when news came from Scot- 
land of fresh successes on the part of Montrose, and of his over- 
throw of the Marquis of Argyle's troops in the victory of Inver- 
lochy. "Before the end of the summer," wrote the conqueror, "I 
shall be in a position to come to your Majesty's aid with a brave 
army." The negotiations at Uxbridge were at once broken off, 
and a few months later the King opened his camj^aign by a march 
to the north, where he hoped to form a junction with Montrose. 
Leicester was stormed, the blockade of Chester raised, and the 
eastern counties threatened, until Fairfax, who had hoped to draw 
Charles back again by a blockade of Oxford, hurried at last on his 
track. Cromwell, w^ho had been suffered by the House to retain 
his command for a few days, joined Fairfax as he drew near the 
King, and his arrival was greeted by loud shouts of welcome from 
the troops. The two armies met near Naseby, to the northwest 
of Northampton. The King was eager to fight. " Never have 
my affairs been in as good a state," he cried ; and Prince Rupert 
was as impatient as his uncle. On the other side, even Cromwell 
doubted the success of the new experiment. " I can say this of 
Naseby," he wrote soon after, " that when I saw the enemy draw" 
up and march in gallant order toward us, and we, a company of 
poor ignorant men, to seek to order our battle, the general having 
commanded me to order all the horse, I could not, riding alone 
about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in assurance 
of victory, because God would by things that are not bring to 
naught things that are. Of which I had great assurance, and 
God did it." The battle began with a furious charge of Rupert 
uphill, which routed the wing opposed to him under Ireton ; while 
the Royalist foot, after a single discharge, clubbed their muskets 
and fell on the centre under Fairfax so hotly that it slowly and 
stubbornly gave way. But the Ironsides were conquerors on the 
left. A single charge broke the northern horse under Langdale, 
who had already fled before them at Marston Moor; and, holding 
his troops firmly in hand, Cromwell fell with them on the flank 
of the Royalist foot in the very crisis of its success. A panic of 
the Royal reserve, and its flight from the field, aided his efforts : 
it was in vain that Rupert returned with forces exhausted by pur- 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



bii 



suit, that Charles, in a passion of despair, called on his troopers 
for " one charge more." The battle was over : artillery, baggage, 
even the Koyal papers, fell into the conqueror's hands ; five thou- 
sand men surrendered ; only two thousand followed the King in 
his headlong flight upon the west. The war was ended at a blow. 
While Charles wandered helplessly in search of fresh forces, Fair- 
fax marched rapidly into Somersetshire, routed the Royal forces 
at Langport, and in three weeks was master of the west. A vic- 
tory at Kilsyth, which gave Scotland for the moment to Mon- 
trose, threw a transient gleam over the darkening fortunes of his 
master's cause ; but the surrender of Bi'istol, and the dispersion of 
the last force Charles could collect in an attempt to relieve Ches- 
ter, was followed by news of the crushing and irretrievable de- 
feat of the "Great Marquis" at Philiphaugh. In the wreck of 
the Royal cause we may pause for a moment over an incident 
whijh brings out in relief the best temper of both sides. Crom- 
Avell "spent much time with God in prayer before the storm" of 
Basing House, where the Marquis of Winchester had held stoutly 
out through the war for the King. The storm ended its resist- 
ance, and the brave old Royalist was brought in a prisoner with 
his house flaming around him. He "broke out," reports a Puri- 
tan by-stander, " and said ' that if the King had no more ground 
in England but Basing House he would adventure it as he did, 
and so maintain it to the uttermost,' comforting himself in this 
matter ' that Basing House was called Loyalty.' " Of loyalty such 
as this Charles was utterly unworthy. The seizure of his papers at 
Naseby had hardly disclosed his intrigues with the Irish Catholics, 
when the Parliament was able to reveal to England a fresh treaty 
with them, which purchased no longer their neutrality, but their 
aid, by the simple concession of every demand they had made. 
The shame was without profit, for whatever aid Ireland might have 
given came too late to be of service. The spring of the following 
year saw the few troops who still clung to Charles surrounded and 
routed at Stow. "You have done your work now," their leader. 
Sir Jacob Astley, said bitterly to his conquerors, " and may go to 
play, unless you fall out among yourselves." 



Section VIII.— Tlie Army and tlie Parliament. 1646—1649. 

\_Authorities. — Mainly as befoi-e, though Clarendon, invaluable during the prog- 
ress of the war, is of little value here, and Cromwell's letters become, unfortunately, 
few at the moment when we most need their aid. On the other hand, Ludlow and 
Whitelock, as well as the passionate and imscrupulous "Memoirs" of Holies and 
Major Hutchinson, become of much importance. For Charles himself, we have Sir 
Thomas Herbert's "Memoirs " of the last two years of this reign. Burnet's "Lives 
of the Plamiltons " throw a good deal of light on Scotch affairs at this time, and Sir 
James Turner's "Memoirs" on the Scotch invasion. The early history of the In- 
dependents, and of the principle of religious freedom, is well told by Mr. Masson 
(" Life of Milton," vol. iii.).] 



With the close of the Civil War we enter on a short period of 

35 



544 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



The Akmy 

AND 
THE PaE- 
I.IAMENT. 

1646- 

1649. 



Seo.viii. confused struggles, tedious and uninteresting in its outer details, 
but of far higher interest than even the war itself in its bearing 
on our after history. Modern England, the England among whose 
thoughts and sentiments we actually live, began with the triumph 
of Naseby. Old things passed suddenly away. When Astley 
gave up his sword, the " work " of the generations which had 
struggled for Protestantism against Catholicism, for public liberty 
against absolute rule, in his own emphatic phrase, was " done." 
So far as these contests were concerned, however the later Stuarts 
might strive to revive them, England could safely " go to play." 
But with the end of this older Avork a new work at once began. 
The constitutional and ecclesiastical problems which still in one 
shape or another beset ns started to the front as subjects of nation- 
al debate in the years between the close of the Civil War and the 
death of the King. The two great parties which have ever since 
divided the social, the political, and the religious life of England, 
whether as Independents and Presbyterians, as Whigs and Tories, 
or as Conservatives and Liberals, sprang into organized existence 
in the contest between the Army and the Parliament. Then for 
the first time began the struggle between political tradition and 
political progress, between the principle of religious conformity 
and the principle of religious freedom, which is far from having 
ended yet. 

It was the religious struggle which drew the political in its 
train. We have already witnessed the rise under Elizabeth of 
sects who did not aim, like the Presbyterians, at a change in 
Church government, but rejected the notion of a national Churcli\ 
jf"^^ all, and insisted on the right of each congi'egation to perfeat/' 
Ns, independence of faith and worship. ~Ki the close of the Queen's 
reign, however, these " Brownists," as they were called from one 
Brown, a clergyman who maintained their tenets, had almost en- 
tirely disappeared. Some, as we saw in the notable instance of 
the congregation which produced the Pilgrim Fathers, had found 
a refuge in Holland, but the bulk had been driven to a fresh con- 
formity with the Established Church. "As for those which we 
call Brownists," says Bacon, "being when they were at the best 
a very small number of very silly and base people, here and there 
in corners dispersed, they are now (thanks be to God), by the 
good remedies that have been used, suppressed and worn out so 
as there is scarce any news of them." As soon, however, as Ab- 
bot's primacy promised a milder rule, the Separatist refugees be- 
gan to venture timidly back again to England. During their ex- 
ile in Holland the main body, under Robinson, had contented 
themselves with the free development of their system of independ- 
ent congregations, each forming in itself a complete Church, and 
to them the name of Independents at a later time attached itself. 
A small part, however, had drifted into a more marked severance 
in doctrine from the Established Church, especially in their belief 
of the necessity of adult baptism, a belief from which their ob- 
scure congregation at Leyden became "known as that of the Bap- 
tists. Both of these sects gathered a church in London in the 



VIII.J 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



645 



middle of James's reign, but the persecuting zeal of Laud pre- 
vented any spread of their opinions under that of his successor; 
and it was not till their numbers were suddenly increased by the 
return of a host of emigrants from New England, with Hugh 
Peters at their liead, on the opening of the Long Parliament, that 
the Congregational or Independent body began to attract atten- 
tion. Lilburne and Burton soon declared themselves adherents 
of what was called " the New England way ;" and a year later 
saw in London alone the rise of "fourscore congregations of sev- 
eral sectaries," as Bishop Hall scornfully tells us, "instructed by 
guides fit for them, cobblers, tailors, felt-makers, and such-like 
trash." But little religious weight, however, could be attributed 
as yet to the Congregational movement, Baxter at this time had 
not heard of the existence of any Lidependents. Milton in his 
earlier pamphlets shows no sign of their influence. Of the hun- 
dred and five ministers present in the Westminster Assembly, 
only five were Congregational in sympathy, and these were all 
returned refugees from Holland. Among the one hundred and 
twenty London ministers in 1643, only three were suspected of 
leanings toward the Sectaries. 

The struggle with Charles, in fact, at its outset only threw new 
difiiculties in the way of religious freedom. It was with strictly 
conservative aims in ecclesiastical as in political m.atters that Pym 
and his colleagues began the strife. Their avowed purpose was 
simply to restore the Church of England to its state under Eliza- 
beth,- and to free it from " innovations," from the changes intro- 
duced by Laud and his fellow-prelates. The great majority of the 
Parliament were averse to any alterations in the constitution or 
doctrine of the Church itself ; and it was only the refusal of the 
bishops to accept any diminution of their power and revenues, the 
growth of a party hostile to Episcopalian government, the neces- 
sity for purchasing the aid of the Scots by a union in religion as 
in politics, and, above all, the urgent need of constructing some new 
ecclesiastical organization in the place of the older organization 
which had become impossible from the Royalist attitude of the 
bishops, that forced on the two Houses the adoption of the Cov- 
enant. But the change to a Presbyterian system of Church gov- 
ernment seemed at that time of little import to the bulk of English- 
men. The Laudian dogma of the necessity of bishops was held 
by few; and the change was generally regarded with approval as 
one which brought the Church of England nearer to that of Scot- 
land, and to the reformed Churches of the continent. But what- 
ever might be the change in its administration, no one imagined 
that it had ceased to be the Church of England. The Tudor the- 
ory of its relation to the State, of its right to embrace all English- 
men within its pale, and to dictate what should be their faith and 
form of worship, remained utterly unquestioned by any man of 
note. The sentiments on which such a theory rested indeed for 
its main support, the power of historical tradition, the association 
of " dissidence " with danger to the State, the sti'ong English in- 
stinct of order, the as strong English dislike of " inn'ovations," 



546 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



with the abhorrence of " indifferency," as a sign of lukewarmness 
in matters of religion, had only been intensified by the earlier in- 
cidents of the struggle with the King. The Parliament therefore 
had steadily pressed on the new system of ecclesiastical govern- 
ment in the midst of the troubles of the war. An Assembly of 
Divines assembled at Westminster received orders to revise the 
Articles, to draw up a Confession of Faith, and a Directory of 
Public Worship, and these, with their scheme of Church govern- 
ment — a scheme only distinguished from that of Scotland by the 
significant addition of a lay court of superior appeal set by Par- 
liament over the whole system of Church courts and assemblies — 
were accepted by the Houses and embodied in a series of Ordi- 
nances. 

Had the change been made at the moment when, " with uplifted 
hands," the Commons swore to the Covenant in St. Margaret's, it 
would probably have been accepted by the country at large. But 
it met with a very different welcome when it came at the end of 
the war. In spite of repeated votes of Parliament for its establish- 
ment, the pure Presbyterian system took root only in London and 
Lancashire. While the divines, indeed, w^ere drawing up their 
platform of uniform belief and worship in the Jerusalem Chamber, 
dissidence had grown into a religious power. La the terrible agony 
of the long struggle against Charles, individual conviction became 
a stronger force than religious tradition. Theological speculation 
took an unprecedented boldness from the temper of the times. 
Four years after the war had begun a horror-stricken pamphleteer 
numbered sixteen religious sects as existing in defiance of the law; 
and, widely as these bodies difiered among themselves, all at onre 
in repudiating any right of control in faith or worship by the 
Church or its clergy. Milton, who had left his Presbyterian 
stand-point, saw at last that " new Presbyter is but old Priest 
writ large." The question of sectarianism soon grew into a prac- 
tical one from its bearing on the war; for the class specially in- 
fected with the new spirit of religious freedom was just the class 
to whose zeal and vigor the Parliament was forced to look for 
success in its struggle. We have seen the prevalence of this 
spirit among the farmers from whom Cromwell drew his L'onsides, 
and his enlistment of these "sectaries" was the first direct breach 
,in the old system of conformitj^ Cromwell had signed the Cov- 
enant, and there is no reason for crediting him with any aversion 
to Presbyterianism as a system of doctrine or of Church organiza- 
tion. His first step, indeed, was a purely practical one, a step dic- 
tated by military necessities, and excused in his mind by a sym- 
pathy with "honest" men, as well as by the growing but still 
vague notion of a communion among Christians wider than that 
of outer conformity in worship or belief. But the alarm and re- 
monstrances of the Presbyterians forced his mind rapidly forward. 
"The State, in choosing men to serve it," Cromwell wrote before 
Marston Moor, " takes no notice of their opinions. If they be will- 
ing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies." Marston Moor encour- 
aged him to press on the Parliament the necessity of at least 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



647 



" tolerating " dissidents, and he succeeded iu procuring the ap- 
pointment of a committee to find some means of effecting this. 
But the conservative temper of the Presbyterian Churchmen was 
fairly roused by his act, and by the growth of sectarianism. "We 
detest and abhor," wrote the London clergy in 1645, "the much- 
endeavored Toleration." The corporation of London petitioned 
Parliament to suppress " all sects without toleration," The Par- 
liament itself was steadily on the conservative side, but the for- 
tunes of the war told as steadily against conservatism. Essex 
and the Presbyterians marched from defeat to defeat. It was 
necessary to new model the army, and to raise the New Model it 
Avas found necessary to give Fairfax power to dispense with any 
signatures to the Covenant. The victory of Naseby raised a far 
wider question than that of mere toleration. "Honest men served 
you faithfully in this action," Cromwell wrote to the Speaker of 
the House of Commons from the very field. " Sir, they are trusty : 
I beseech you in the name of God not to discourage them. He 
I that ventures his life for the liberty of his country,! wish he trust 
\God for the liberty of his conscience." The storm of Bristol en- 
couraged him to proclaim the new principles yet more distinctly. 
" Presbyterians, Independents, all here have the same spirit of 
faith and prayer, the same presence and answer. They agree here, 
have no names of difference ; pity it is it should be otherwise any 
where. All that believe have the real unity, which is the most 
glorious, being the inward and spiritual, in the body and in the 
head. For being united in forms (commonly called uniformity), 
every Christian will for peace' sake study and do as far as con- 
science will permit. And from brethren in things of the mind we 
look for no compulsion but that of light and reason." 

The increasing firmness of Cromwell's language was due to the 
growing irritation of his Presbyterian opponents. The two parties 
became every day more clearly defined. The Presbyterian minis- 
ters complained bitterly of the increase of the sectaries, and de- 
nounced the existing toleration. Scotland, whose army was still 
before Newark, pressed for the execution of the Covenant and the 
universal enforcement of a Presbyterian uniformity. Sir Harry 
Vane, on the other hand, was striving to bring the Parliament 
round to less rigid courses by the introduction of two hundred 
and thirty new members, who filled the seats left vacant by Roy- 
alist secessions, and the more eminent of whom, such as Ireton and 
Algernon Sidney, were inclined to the Independents. The press- 
ure of the New Model, and the remonstrances of Cromwell as its 
mouthpiece, hindered any effective movement toward persecution. 
Amid the wreck of his fortunes Charles intrigued busily with both 
parties, and promised liberty of worship to Vane and the Inde- 
pendents, at the moment when he was negotiating for a refuge 
with the Presbyterian Scots. His negotiations were quickened by 
the march of Fairfax upon Oxford. Driven from his last refuge, 
the King, after some aimless wanderings, made his appearance in 
the camp of the Scots. Lord Leven at once fell back with his 
Royal prize on Newcastle. The new aspect of affairs threatened 



548 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the party of religious freedom with ruin. Hated as they were by 
the Scots, by the Lords, by the city of London, the apparent junc- 
tion of Charles with their enemies destroyed their growing hopes 
in the Commons, where the prospects of a speedy peace on Pres- 
byterian terms at once swelled t-he majority of their opponents. 
The two Houses laid their conditions of peace before the King, 
without a dream of resistance from one who seemed to have placed 
himself at their mercy. They required for the Parliament the com- 
mand of the army and fleet for twenty years ; the exclusion of all 
" Malignants," or Royalists who had taken part in the war, from 
civil and military office ; the abolition of Episcopacy ; and the es- 
tablishment of a Presbyterian Church. Of toleration of liberty of 
conscience they said not a word. The Scots pressed these terms 
on the King " with tears ;" his Royalist friends, and even the 
Queen, urged their acceptance. But the aim of Charles was sim- 
ply delay. Time and the dissensions of his enemies, as he believed, 
were fighting for him. "I am not without hope," he wrote cool- 
ly, " that I shall be able to draw either the Presbyterians or the 
Independents to side with me for extirpating one another, so that 
I shall be really King again." His refusal of the terms ofiered by 
the Houses was a defeat for the Presbyterians, " What will be- 
come of us," asked one of them, " now that the King has rejected 
our proposals ?" " What would have become of^^" retorted an 
Independent, " had he accepted them ?" The vigor of Holies and 
the Conservative leaders in the Parliament rallied however to a 
bolder elFort. While the Scotch army lay at Newcastle they could 
not insist on dismissing their own ; but the withdrawal of the 
Scots from England would not only place the King's person in the 
hands of the Houses, but enable them to free themselves from 
the pressure of their own soldiers by disbanding the New Model. 
Hopeless of success with the King, and unable to bring him into 
Scotland in face of the refusal of the General Assembly to receive 
a sovereign who would not swear to the Covenant, the Scottish 
army accepted £400,000 in discharge of its claims, handed Charles 
over to a committee of the Houses, and mai'ched back over the 
Border. Masters of the King, the Presbyterian leaders at once 
moved boldly to their attack on the sectaries. They voted that 
the army should be disbanded, and that a new army should be 
raised for the suppression of the Irish rebellion with strictly Pres- 
byterian officers at its head. It was in vain that the men protested 
against being severed from "officers that we love," and that the 
Council of Officers strove to gain time by pressing on the Parlia- 
ment the danger of mutiny. Holies and his fellow-leaders were 
resolute, and their ecclesiastical legislation showed the end at 
which their resolution aimed. Direct enforcement of conformity 
was impossible till the New Model was disbanded ; but the Par- 
liament pressed on in the work of providing the machinery for en- 
forcing it as soon as the army was gone. Vote after vote ordered 
the setting up of Presbyteries throughout the country, and the 
first-fruits of these effiarts were seen in the Presbyterian organiza- 
tion of London, and in the first meeting of its Synod at St. Paul's. 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



649 



Even the officers on Fairfax's staff were ordered to take the Cov- 
enant. 

All hung, however, on the disbanding of the New Model, and the 
New Model showed no will to. disband itself. Its new attitude 
can only fairly be judged by remembering what the conquerors 
of Naseby really were. They were soldiers of a different class 
and of a different temper from the soldiers of any other army that 
the world has seen. Their ranks were filled for the most part with 
young farmers and tradesmen of the lower sort, maintaining them- 
selves, for their pay was twelve mouths in arrear, mainly at their 
own cost. They had been specially picked as " honest" or relig- 
ious men, and, whatever enthusiasm or fanaticism they may have 
shown, their very enemies acknowledged the order and piety of 
their camp. They looked on themselves not as swordsmen, to be 
caught up and flung away at the will of a paymaster, but as men 
who had left farm and merchandise at a direct call from God. A 
great work had been given them to do, and the call bound them 
till it was done. King-craft, as Charles was hoping, might yet re- 
store tyranny to the throne. A more immediate danger threaten- 
ed that liberty of conscience which was to them " the ground of 
the quarrel, and for which so many of their friends' lives had been 
lost, and so much of their own blood has been spilt." They would 
wait before disbanding till these liberties were secured, and if need 
came they would again act to secure them. But their resolve 
sprang from no pride in the brute force of the sword they wield- 
ed. On the. contrary, as they pleaded passionately at the bar of 
the Commons, "on becoming soldiers we have not ceased to be 
citizens." Their aims and proposals throughout were purely those 
of citizens, and of citizens who were ready the moment their aim 
was won to return peacefully to their homes. Thought and dis- 
cussion had turned the army into a vast Parliament, a Parliament 
which regarded itself as the representatives of "godly" men in 
as high a degree as the Parliament at Westminster, and which must 
have become every day more conscious of its superiority in polit- 
ical capacity to its rival. Ireton, the moving spirit of the New 
Model, had no equal as a statesman in St. Stephen's; nor is it pos- 
sible to comjDare the large and far-sighted proposals of the army 
with the blind and narrow policy of the two Houses, Whatever 
we may think of the means by which the New Model sought its 
aims, we must injustice remember that, so far as those aims went, 
the New Model was in the right. For the last two hundred years 
England has been doing little more than carrying out in a slow 
and tentative way the scheme of political and religious reform 
which the army propounded at the close of the Civil War. It was 
not till the rejection of the officers' proposals had left little hope 
of conciliation that the army acted, but its action was quick and 
decisive. It set aside for all political purposes the Council of Of- 
ficers, and elected a new Council of Adjutators or Assistants, two 
members being named by each regiment, which summoned a gen- 
eral meeting of the army at Triploe Heath, where the proposals of 
pay and disbanding made by the Parliament were rejected with 



550 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



cries of "Justice." While the army was gathering, in fact, the 
Adjutators had taken a step which put submission out of the ques- 
tion. A rumor that the King was to be removed to London, a 
new army raised, a new civil war begun, roused the soldiers to 
madness. Five hundred troopers suddenly appeared before Holm- 
by House, where the King was residing in charge of the Parlia- 
mentary Commissioners, and displaced its guards. "Where is 
your commission for this act?" Charles asked the cornet who com- 
manded them. " It is behind me," said Joyce, pointing to his sol- 
diers. " It is written in very fine and legible characters," laughed 
the King. The seizure had in fact been previously concerted be- 
tv/een Charles and the Adjutators. " I will part willingly," he 
told Joyce, " if the soldiers confirm all that you have promised 
me. You will exact from me nothing that offends my conscience 
or my honor." "It is not our maxim," replied the cornet, "to 
constrain the conscience of any one, still less that of our King." 
After a first burst of terror at the news, the Parliament fell furi- 
ously on Cromwell, who had relinquished his command and quitted 
the army before the close of the war, and had ever since been em- 
ployed as a mediator between the two parties. The charge of 
having incited the mutiny fell before his vehement protest; but he 
was driven to seek refuge with the army, and in three days it was 
in full march upon London. Its demands were expressed with per- 
fect clearness in a "Humble Representation" which it addressed 
to the Houses. "We desire a settlement of the peace of the king- 
dom and of the liberties of the subject according to the votes and 
declarations of Parliament. We desire no alteration in the civil 
government : as little do we desire to interrupt or in the least to^ 
intermeddle with the settlement of the Presbyterial government." 
They demanded toleration ; but " not to open a way to licentious 
living under pretense of obtaining ease for tender consciences, we 
profess, as ever, in these things Avhen the State has made a settle- 
ment we have nothing to say, but to submit or suffer." It was 
with a view to such a settlement that they demanded the expul- 
sion of eleven members from the Commons, with Holies at their 
head, Avhom the soldiers charged with stirring xip strife between 
the army and the Parliament, and with a design of renewing the 
civil war. After fruitless negotiations, the terror of the London- 
ers forced the eleven to withdraw; and the Houses aamed Com- 
missioners to treat on the questions at issue. 

Though Fairfax and Cromwell had at last been forced from 
their position as mediators into a hearty co-operation with the 
army, its political direction rested at this moment with Cromwell's 
son-in-law, Henry Ireton, and Ireton looked for a real settlement, 
not to the Parliament, but to the King. " There must be some 
difference," he urged bluntly,*" between conquerors and conquer- 
ed ;" but the terms which he laid before Charles were terms of 
studied moderation. The vindictive spirit which the Parliament 
had shown against the Royalists and the Church disappeared in 
the terms he laid before the King; and the army contented itself 
with the banishment of seven leading "delinquents," a general 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



551 



Act of Oblivion for the rest, tlio ■vs'i'tha.;i/,v,,l of all coercive power 
from the clergy, the control of Parliament over the militar}^ and 
naval forces for ten years, and its nominatioi) of the great officers 
of State. Behind these demands, however, --Lr, .■, tlie ciusterly and 
comprehensive plan of political reform •' i.d already been 

sketched by the army in the "Hum' .ntation," with 

which it had begun its march on London. i wo'rsirip vvei*© 

to be free to all. Acts enforcing the us s'i; -er-boolc, or 

attendance at Church, or the enforcement oi ; .>b Covenant, were to 
be repealed. Even Papists, whatever other ..estraints might be 
imposed, were to be freed from the bondage of compulsory worship. 
Parliaments were to be triennial, and the House of Commons to 
be reformed by a fairer distribution of seats and of electoral rights ; 
taxation was to be readjusted ; legal procedure simplified ; a crowd 
of political, commercial, and judicial privileges abolished. Ireton 
believed that Charles could be " so managed " (says Mrs. Hutch- 
inson) "as to comply with the public good of his people after he 
could no longer uphold his violent will." But Charles was equal- 
ly dead to the moderation and to the wisdom of this great Act of 
Settlement. He saw in the crisis nothing but an opportunity of 
balancing one party against another ; and believed that the army 
had more need of his aid than he of the army's. "You can not 
do without me — you are lost if I do not support you," he said to 
Ireton as he pressed his proposals. " You have an intention to be 
the arbitrator between us and the Parliament," Ireton quietly re- 
plied, " and we mean to be so between the Parliament and your 
Majesty." But the King's tone was soon explained by a rising 
of the London mob, which broke into the House of Commons, and 
forced its members to recall the eleven. While fourteen peers and 
a hundred Commoners fled to the armjj", those who remained at 
Westminster prepared for an open struggle with it, and invited 
Charles to return to London. But the army w\as again on the 
march. " In two days," Cromwell said, coolly, "the city will be 
in our hands." The soldiers entered London in triumph, and re- 
stored the fugitive members ; the eleven were again expelled, and 
the army leaders resumed negotiations Avith the King. The indig- 
nation of the soldiers at his delays and intrigues niade the task 
hourly more difficult; but Cromwell, who now threw his whole 
Aveight on Ireton's side, clung to the hope of accommodation Avith 
a passionate tenacity. His mind, conservative by tradition, and 
above all practical in temper, saw the political difficulties Avhich 
Avould follow on the abolition of Royalty, and in spite of the King's 
evasions he persisted in negotiating Avith him. But Cromwell 
stood almost alone ; the Parliament refused to accept Ireton's pro- 
posals as a basis of peace, Charles still evaded, and the army then 
o-rew restless and suspicious. There were cries for a Avide reform, 
for the abolition of the House of Peers, for a new House of Com- 
mons; and the Adjutators called on the Council of Officers to dis- 
cuss the question of abolishing Royalty itself Cromwell Avas 
never braver than Avhen he faced the gathering storm, forbade tlie 
discussion, adjourned the Council, and sent the officers to their rer^i- 



552 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ments. But the strain was too great to last long, and Charles was 
still resolute to " play his gatne." He was, in fact, so far from be- 
ing in earnest in his negotiations with Cromwell and Ireton, that 
at the moment thoj were risking their lives for him he was con- 
ducting another and equally delusive negotiation with the Parlia- 
ment, fomenting the discontent in London, preparing for a fresh 
Royalist rising, and for an invasion of the Scots in his favor. " Tiie 
two nations," he wrote joyously, " will soon be at war," All that 
was needed for the success of his schemes was his own liberty ; 
and in the midst of his hopes of an accommodation, Cromwell found 
with astonishment that he had been duped throughout, and that 
the King had fled. 

The flight fanned the excitement of the army into frenzy, and 
only the courage of Cromwell averted an open mutiny in its gath- 
ering at Ware, But even Cromwell was powerless to break the 
spirit which now pervaded the soldiers, and the King's perfidy 
left him without resource. " The King is a man of great parts 
and great imderstanding," he said at last, "but so great a dis- 
sembler and so false a man that he is not to be trusted." By a 
strange error, Charles had made his way from Hampton Court to 
the Isle of Wight, perhaps with some hope from the sympathy of 
Colonel Hammond, the Governor of Carisbrook Castle, and again 
found himself a prisoner. Foiled in his effort to put himself at the 
head of the new civil war, he set himself to organize it from his 
prison ; and while again opening delusive negotiations with the 
Parliament, he signed a secret treaty with the Scots for the in- 
vasion of the realm. The rise of Independency, and the practical 
suspension of the Covenant, had produced a violent reaction in his 
favor north of the Tweed. The nobles gathered around the Duke 
of Hamilton, and cai'ried the elections against Argyle and the ad- 
herents of the Parliament ; and on the King's consenting to a stip- 
ulation for the re-establishment of Presbytery in England, they 
ordered an army to be levied for his support. In England the 
whole of the conservative party, with many of the most conspicu- 
ous members of the Long Parliament at its head, was drifting, in 
its horror of the religious and political changes which seemed im- 
pending, toward the King; and the news froiii Scotland gave the 
signal for fitful insurrections in almost every quarter. London was 
only held down by main force, old officers of the Parliament un- 
furled the Royal flag in South Wales, and surprised Pembroke. 
The seizure of Berwick and Carlisle opened a way for the Scotch 
invasion. Kent, Essex, and Hertford broke out in revolt. The 
fleet in the Downs sent their captains on shore, hoisted the King's 
pennon, and blockaded the Thames. " The liour is come for the 
Parliament to save the kingdom and to govern alone," cried Crom- 
well ; but the Parliament only showed itself eager to take advan- 
tage of the crisis to profess its adherence to Royalty, to re-open the 
negotiations it had broken ofl" with the King, and to deal tlie fiercest 
blow at religious freedom which it had ever received. Tiie Pres- 
byterians flocked back to their seats ; and an " Ordinance for the 
suppression of Blasphemies and Heresies," which Yane and Crom- 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



553 



well had long held at bay, was passed by triumphant majorities. 
Any man — runs this terrible statute — denying the doctrine of the 
Trinity or of the Divinity of Christ, or that the books of Scripture 
are not "the Word of God," or the resurrection of the body, or. a 
future day of judgment, and refusing on trial to abjure his hei'esy, 
" shall suffer the pain of death." Any man declaring (amid a 
long list of other errors) " that man by nature hath free will to 
turn to God," that there is a Purgatory, that images are lawful, 
^that mfant baptism is unlawful; any one denying the obligation 
' ofobserving the Lord's day, or asserting " that the Church govern- 
ment by Presbytery^is anti-Christian or unlawful," shall on a re- 
fusal to renounce his errors " be commanded to prison." It was 
plain that the Presbyterian party counted on the King's success to 
resume its policy of conformity ; and had Charles been free, or the 
New Model disbanded, its hopes would probably have been real- 
ized. But Charles, though eager to escape, M^as still safe at Ca- 
risbrook ; and the New Model was facing fiercely the danger which 
surrounded it. The wanton renewal of the war at a moment when 
all tended to peace swept from the mind of Fairfax and Cromwell, 
as from that of the army at large, every thought of reconciliation 
with the King. Soldiers and generals were at last bound together 
again in a stern resolve. On the eve of their march against the revolt 
all gathered in a solemn jDrayer-meeting, and came " to a very clear 
and joint resolution, 'That it was our duty, if ever the Lord brought 
lis back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, 
to account for the blood he has shed and the mischief he has clone 
to his utmost against the Lord's cause and people in this poor na- 
tion.'" In three days Fairfax had trampled out the Kentish in- 
surrection, and had prisoned that of the eastern counties within 
the walls of Colchester, while Cromwell drove the Welsh insur- 
gents within those of Pembroke. Both the towns, however, held 
stubbornly out ; and though a Royalist rising under Lord Holland 
in the neighborhood of London was easily put down, there was no 
force left to stem the inroad of the Scots, who were pouring over 
the Border some twenty thousand strong. Luckily the surrender 
of Pembroke at the critical moment set Cromwell free. Pushing 
rapidly northward with five thousand men, he called in the force 
nnder Lambert which had been gallantly hanging on the Scottish 
flank, and pushed over the Yorkshire hills into the valley of the 
Ribble. The Duke of Hamilton, reinforced by three thousand 
Royalists of the north, had advanced as fir as Preston. With an 
army which now numbered ten thousand men, Cromwell poured 
down on the flank of the Duke's straggling line of march, attacked 
the Scots as they retired behind the Ribble, passed the river with 
them, cut their rearguard to pieces at Wigan, forced the defile at 
Warrington, where the flying enemy made a last and desperate 
stand, and forced their foot to surrendei', while Lambert hunted 
down Hamilton and the horse. Fresh from its victory, the New 
Model pushed over the Border, while the peasants of Ayrshire and 
the west rose in the " Whiggamore raid" (notable as the first event 
in which we find the name "Whig," which is possibly the same 



554 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



as our "Whey," and conveys a taunt against the "sour-milk" faces 
of the fanatical Ayrshiremen), and, marching upon Edinburgh, dis- 
persed the Royalist party and again installed Argyle in power. 

Argyle welcomed Cromwell as a deliverer; but the victorious 
general had hardly entered Edinburgh when he was recalled by 
pressing news from the south. The temper with which the Par- 
liament had met the Royalist revolt was, as we have seen, M'idely 
different from that of the army. It had recalled the eleven mem- 
bers, and had passed the Ordinance against heresy. At the mo- 
ment of the victory at Preston the Lords were discussing charges 
of treason against Cromwell, while commissioners had again been 
sent to the Isle of Wight, in spite of the resistance of the Inde- 
pendents, to conclude peace with the King. Royalists and Pres- 
byterians alike pressed Charles to grasp the easy terms which were 
now offered him. But his hopes from Scotland had only broken 
down to give place to hopes of a new war with the aid of an army 
from Ireland ; and the negotiations saw forty days wasted in use- 
less chicanery. " Nothing," Charles wrote to his friends, " is changed 
in ray designs." But at this moment the surrender of Colchester 
and the convention with Argyle set free the army, and petitions 
from its regiments at once demanded "justice on the King." A 
fresh " Remonstrance " from the Council of Officers called for the 
election of a new Parliament ; for electoral reform ; for the recog- 
nition of the supremacy of the Parliament "in all things;" for the 
change of kingship, should it be retained, into a magistracy elected \^ 
by the Parliament, and without veto on its proceedings ; and de^ 
manded above all "that the capital and grand author of our 
troubles, by whose commissions, commands, and procurements, 
and in whose behalf and for whose interest only, of will and' 
power, all our wars and troubles have been, with all the miseries 
attending them, may be specially brought to justice for the trea- 
son, blood, and mischief he is therein guilty of." The reply of the 
Parliament to this Remonstrance Avas to accept the King's con- 
cessions, unimportant as they were, as a basis of peace. The step 
was accepted by the soldiers as a defiance: Charles was again 
seized by a troop of horse, and carried off to Hurst Castle; while 
a letter from Fairfax announced the march of his army upon Lon- 
don. "We shall know now," said Vane, as the troops took their 
post around the Houses of Parliament, "who is on the side of the 
King, and who on the side of the people." But the terror of the 
army proved weaker among their members than the agonized loy- 
alty which strove to save Charles, and an immense majority in 
both Houses still voted for the acceptance of the terms he had 
offered. The next morning saw Colonel Pride at the door of the 
House of Commons with a list of forty members of the majority 
in his hands. The Council of Officers had resolved to exclude 
them, and as each member made his appearance he was arrested 
and put in confinement. "By what right do you act ?" a member 
asked. "By the right of the sword," Hugh Peters is said to have 
replied. The House was still resolute, but on the following morn- 
ing forty more members were excluded, and the rest gave way. 



VUL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



555 



The formal expulsion of one hundred and forty members left the 
Independents, who alone remained, free to co-operate with the army 
which had delivered them; the peace votes were at once rescind- 
ed ; the removal of Charles to Windsor was followed by an instant 
resolution for his trial, and by the nomination of a Court of one 
hundred and fifty Commissioners to conduct it, with John Brad- 
shaw, a lawyer of eminence, at their head. The rejection of this 
Ordinance by the few peers who remained brought about a fresh 
resolution from the Lower House " that the People are, under God, 
the original of all just power; that the Commons of England in 
Parliament assembled — being chosen by and representing the 
People — have the supreme power in this nation ; and that whatso- 
ever is enacted and declared for law by the Commons in Parlia- 
ment assembled hath the force bf law, and all the people of this 
nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concur- 
rence of the King or House of Peers be not had thereunto." 

Charles appeared before the Court only to deny its competence 
and to refuse to plead; but thirty-two witnesses were examined 
to satisfy the consciences of his judges, and it was not till the 
fifth day of the trial that he was condemned to death as a tyrant, 
traitor, murderer, and enemy of his country. The popular excite- 
ment had vented itself in cries of " Justice," or " God save your 
Maj'esty," as the trial went on, but all save the loud outcries of 
the soldiers was hushed as Charles passed to receive his doom. 
The dignity which he had failed to preserve in his long jangling 
with Bradshaw and the judges returned at the call of death. 
Whatever had been the faults and follies of his life, " he nothing 
common did, or mean, upon that memorable scene." Two masked 
executioners awaited the King as he mounted the scafibld, which 
had been erected outside one of the windows of the Banqueting 
House at Whitehall; the streets and roofs were thronged with 
spectators ; and a strong body of soldiers stood drawn up beneath. 
His head fell at the first blow, and as the executioner lifted it to 
the sight of all a groan of pity and horror burst from the silent 
crowd. 



Section IX,— The Common^vealtli. 1649—1653. 

[^Authorities. — Rushworth's collection ceases with the King's Trial ; Whitelock 
and Ludlow continue as before, and must be supplemented by the Parliamentary 
History and the State Trials. Special lives of Vane and Martyn will be found in 
Mr. ITorster's "Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and in a vigorous defense of the 
Council of State in the " History of the Commonwealth," by Mr. Bisset. For Irish 
affairs we have a vast store of materials in the Ormond Papers and Letters collect- 
ed by Carte, to which we may add Cromwell's dispatches in Cai'lyle's "Letters." 
The account given by Mr. Carl3'le of the Scotch war is perhaps the most valuable 
portion of his work. The foreign politics and wars of this period are admirably 
illustrated with a copious appendix of documents by M. Guizot ("Republic and 
Cromwell," vol. i.), whose account of the whole period is the fairest and best for the 
general reader. A biography of Blake has been published by Mr. Hejiworth Dixon.] 



The news of the King's death "w^as received tliroughout Europe 



556 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



with a thrill of horror. The Czar of Russia chased the English 
envoy from his court. The embassador of France was withdrawn 
on the proclamation of the Republic. The Protestant powers of 
the Continent seemed more anxious than any to disavow all con- 
nection with the Protestant people who had brought a King to 
the block. Holland took the lead in acts of open hostility to the 
new jDOwer as soon as the news of the execution reached the 
Hague: the States -General waited solemnly on the Prince of 
Wales, who took the title of Charles the Second, and recognized 
him as " Majesty," Avhile they refused an audience to the English 
envoys. Their Stadtholder, his brother-in-law, the Prince of Or- 
ange, was supported by popular sympathy in the aid and encour- 
agement he afforded to Charles ; and the eleven ships of the En- 
glish fleet, which had found a refuge at the Hague ever since their 
revolt from the Parliament, were suffered to sail under Rupert's 
command on an errand of sheer piracy, though with a Royal com- 
mission, and to render the seas unsafe for English traders. The dan- 
ger, however, was far greater nearer home. The Scots proclaimed 
Charles the Second as their king on the news of his father's death, 
and at once dispatched an embassy to the Hague to invite him to 
ascend the throne. Ormond, who had at last succeeded in uniting 
the countless factions who ever since the Rebellion had turned Ire- 
land into a chaos — the old Irish Catholics or native party under 
Owen Roe O'Neil, the Catholics of the English Pale, the Episco- 
palian Royalists, the Presbyterial Royalists of the north — called 
on Charles to land at once in a country where he would find three 
fourths of its people devoted to liis cause. Nor was the danger from 
without met by resolu-tion and energy on the part of the diminished^ 
Parliament which remained the sole depositary of legal powers. 
The Commons entered on their new task with hesitation and de- 
lay. More than a month passed after the King's execution before 
the Monarchy was formally abolished, and the government of the 
nation provided for by the creation of a Council of State consist- 
ing of forty-one members selected from the Commons, who Avere 
intrusted with full executive power at home and abroad. Two 
months more elapsed before the passing of the memorable Act 
which declared " that the People of England and of all the domin- 
ions and territories thereunto belonging are and shall be, and are 
hereby constituted, made, established, and confirmed to be a Com- 
monwealth and Free State, and shall henceforward be governed as 
a Commonwealth and Free State by the supreme authority of this 
nation, the Representatives of the People in Pmiiament, and by 
such as they shall appoint and constitute officers .-md ministers for 
the good of the people, and that without any King or House of 
Lords." 

Of the dangers which threatened the new Commonwealth, some 
were more apparent than real. The rivalry of France and Spain, 
both anxious for its friendship, secured it from the hostility of the 
gi-eater powers of the Continent, and the ill-will of Holland could 
be delayed, if not averted, by negotiations. The acceptance of the 
Covenant was insisted on bv Scotland before it would formallv re- 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



557 



ceive Charles as its ruler, and nothing but necessity would induce 
him to comply with such a demand. On the side of Ireland the 
danger was more pressing, and an army of twelve thousand men 
was set apart for a vigorous prosecution of the Irish war. The 
Commonwealth found considerable difficulties at home. The death 
of Charles gave fresh vigor to the Royalist cause, and the new 
loyalty was stirred to enthusiasm by the publication of the " Eikon 
Basilike," a work really due to the ingenuity of Dr. Gauden, a Pres- 
byterian minister, but which was believed to have been composed 
by the King himself in his later hours of captivity, and which re- 
flected with admirable skill the hopes, the suffering, and the piety 
of the Royal " martyr." The dreams of a rising were roughly 
checked by the execution of the Duke of Hamilton and Lords Hol- 
land and Capell, who had till now been confined in the Tower. 
But the popular disaffection told even on the Council of State. A 
majority of its members declined the oath offered to them at their 
earliest meeting, pledging them to an approval of the King's death 
and the establishment of the Commonwealth. Half the judges re- 
tired from the bench. Thousands of refusals met the demand of 
an engagement to be faithful to the Republic which was made 
from all beneficed clergymen and public functionaries. It was 
not till May, and even then in spite of the ill-will of the citizens, 
that the Council ventured to proclaim the Commonwealth in Lon- 
don. A yet more formidable peril lay in the selfishness of the 
Parliament itself. It was now a mere fragment of the House of 
Commons; the members of the Rump — as it was contemptuously 
called — numbered hardly a hundred, and of those the average at- 
tendance was little more than fifty. In reducing it by " Pride's 
Purge" to the mere shadow of a House the army had never 
dreamed of its continuance as a permanent assembly : it had, in 
fact, insisted as a condition of even its temporary continuance 
that it should prepare a bill for the summoning of a fresh Pai-lia- 
raent. The plan put forward by the Council of Officers is still in- 
teresting as the base of many later efforts toward Parliamentary 
refoi-m ; it advised a dissolution in the spring, the assembling every 
two years of a new Parliament consisting of four hundred mem- 
bers, elected by all householders ratable to the poor, and a re- 
distribution of seats which would have given the privilege of rep- 
resentation to all places of importance. Paid military officers 
and civil officials were excluded from election. The plan was ap- 
parently accepted by the Commons, and a bill based on it was 
again and again discussed ; but there was a suspicion that no se- 
rious purpose of its own dissolution was entertained by the House. 
The popular discontent at once found a mouthpiece in John Lil- 
burne, a brave, hot-headed soldier, and the excitement of the 
army appeared suddenly in a formidable mutiny. " You must cut 
these people in pieces," Cromwell burst out in the Council of State, 
" or they will cut you in pieces ;" and a forced march of fifty miles 
to Burford enabled him to burst on the mutinous regiments at 
midnight, and to stamp out the revolt. But resolute as he was 
against disorder, Cromwell went honestly with the army in its 



558 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



demand of a new Parliament ; he believed, and in his haranp^ue to 
the mutineers he pledged himself to the assertion, that the House 
purposed to dissolve itself. Within the House, however, a vigor- 
ous knot of politicians was resolved to prolong its existence ; and 
in a witty paraphrase of the story of Moses, Henry Martyn had 
already pictured the Commonwealth as a new-born and delicate 
babe, and hinted that " no one is so proper to bring it up as the 
mother who has brought it into the world." As yet, however, 
their intentions were kept secret, and, in spite of the delays thrown 
in the way of the bill for a new Representative body, Cromwell en- 
tertained no serious suspicion of such a design, when he was sum- 
moned to Ireland by a series of Royalist successes which left only 
Dublin in the hands of the Parliamentary forces. 

With Scotland threatening war and a naval struggle impending 
with Holland, it was necessary that the work of the army in Ire- 
land should be done quickly. The temper, too, of Cromwell and 
his soldiers was one of vengeance, for the horror of the Irish Mas- 
sacre remained living in every English breast, and the revolt was 
looked upon as a continuance of the Massacre. " We are come," 
he said on his landing, " to ask an account of the innocent blood 
that hath been shed, and to endeavor to bring to an account all 
who by appearing in arms shall justify the same." A sortie from 
Dublin had already broken up Ormond's siege of the capital ; and 
feeling himself powerless to keep the field before the new army, 
the Marquis had thrown his best troops, three thousand English- 
men under Sir Arthur Aston, as a garrison into Drogheda. The 
storm of Drogheda was the first of a series of awful massacres. 
The garrison fought bravely, and repulsed the first attack ; but a 
second drove Aston and his force back to the Mill-Mount. " Our 
men getting up to them," ran Cromwell's terrible dispatch, " were 
ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And, indeed, being 
in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in 
arms in the town, and I think that night they put to death about 
two thousand men." A few fled to St. Peter's church, " where- 
upon I ordered the steeple to be burned, where one of them was 
heard to say in the midst of the flames, ' God damn me, I burn, I 
burn.' " " In the church itself nearly one thousand Avere put to 
the sword. I believe all their friars were knocked on the head 
promiscuously but two," but these were the sole exceptions to 
the rule of killing the soldiers only. At a later time Cromwell 
challenged his enemies to give " an instance of one man since 
my coming into Ireland, not in arms, massacred, destroyed, or 
burned." But for soldiers there was no mercy. Of the rem- 
nant who surrendered through hunger, "when they submitted, 
their officers were knocked on the head, and every tenth man of 
the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped for the Barbadoes." "I 
am persuaded," the dispatch ends, "that this is a righteous judg- 
ment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued 
their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it will tend to 
prevent the effusion of blood for the future." A detachment suf- 
ficed to relieve Deny and to quiet Ulster; and Cromwell turned 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



to the south, where as stout a defense was followed by as terrible 
a massacre at Wexford, Fresh successes at Ross and Kilkenny- 
brought him to Waterford ; but the city held stubbornly out, dis- 
ease thinned his army, where there was scarce an officer who had 
not been sick, and the general himself was arrested by illness, and 
at last the tempestuous weather drove him into winter-quarters 
at Cork with his work half done. The winter was one of terrible 
anxiety. The Parliament showed less and less inclination to dis-" 
solve itself, and met the growing discontent by a stricter censor- 
ship of the press and a fruitless prosecution of John Lilburne. En- 
glish commerce was ruined by the piracies of Rupert's fleet, which 
now anchored at Kinsale to support the Royalist cause in Ireland. 
The energy of Vane indeed had already recreated a navy; squad- 
rons were being dispatched into the British seas, the Mediterra- 
nean, and the Levant ; and Colonel Blake, who had distinguished 
himself by his heroic defense of Taunton during the war, was 
placed at the head of a fleet which drove Rupert from the Irish 
coast, and finally blockaded him in tte Tagus. But even the en- 
ergy of Vane quailed before the danger from the Scots. " One 
must go and die there," the young King cried at the news of Or- 
mond's defeat before Dublin, " for it is shameful for me to live else- 
where." But his ardor for an Irish campaign cooled as Cromwell 
marched from victory to victory ; and from the isle of Jersey, 
which alone remained faithful to him of all his southern domin- 
ions, Charles renewed the negotiations with Scotland which his 
hopes from Ireland had broken. They were again delayed by a 
proposal on the part of Montrose to attack the very government 
with whom his master was negotiating ; but the failure and death 
of the Marquis in the spring forced Charles to accept the Presby- 
terian conditions. The news of the negotiations at Breda filled 
the Parliament with dismay, for Scotland was raising an army, and 
Fairfax, while willing to defend England against a Scotch inva- 
sion, scrupled to take the lead in an invasion of Scotland. The 
Council recalled Cromwell from Ireland, but his cooler head saw 
that there was yet time to finish his work in the west. During 
the winter he had been busily pi'eparing for a new campaign, and 
it was only after the storm of Clonmell, and the overthrow of the 
Irish army under Hugh O'Neile in the hottest fight the army had 
yet fought, that he embarked his soldiers for England. 

Cromwell entered London amid the shouts of a great multitude ; 
and a month later, as Charles landed on the shores of Scotland, the 
English army started for the north. It crossed the Tweed, fifteen 
thousand men strong ; but the terror of the Irish massacres hung 
round its leader, the country was deserted as he advanced, and he 
was forced to cling for provisions to the fleet which sailed along 
the coast. Leslie, with a larger force, refused battle, and lay ob- 
stinately in his lines between Edinburgh and Leith ; a march of the 
English army around his position to the slopes of the Pentlands 
only brought about a change of the Scottish front; and as Crom- 
well fell back baffled upon Dunbar, Leslie encamped upon the 
heights above the town, and cut ofi" the English retreat along the 

36 



560 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



coast by the seizure of Cockburnspath. His post was almost un- 
assailable, while the soldiers of Cromwell fell fast with disease; 
and their general had resolved on an embarkation of his forces, 
when he saw in the dusk of evening signs of movement in the 
Scottish camp. Leslie's caution had at last been overpowered by 
the zeal of the preachers, and his army moved down to the lower 
ground between the hillside on which it was encamped and a little 
brook which covered the English front. His horse was far in ad- 
vance of the main body, and it had hardly reached the level 
ground when Cromwell in the dim dawn flung his whole force 
upon it. "They run, I profess they run!" he cried as the Scotch 
horse broke after a desperate resistance, and threw into confusion 
the foot who were hurrying to their aid. Then, as the sun rose 
over the mist of the morning, he added in nobler words : "Let God 
arise, and let his enemies be scattered ! Like as the mist vanish- 
eth, so shalt Thou drive them away!" In less than an hour the 
victory was complete. The defeat at once became a rout; ten 
thousand prisoners were taken, with all the baggage and guns; 
three thousand were slain, Avith scarce any loss on the part of 
the conquerors. Leslie reached Edinburgh, a general without an 
army. The effect of Dunbar was at once seen in the attitude of 
the Continental powers. Spain hastened to recognize the Repub- 
lic, and Holland offered its alliance. But Cromwell was watching 
with anxiety the growing discontent at home. The general am- 
nesty claimed by Ireton and the bill for the Parliament's dissolu- 
tion still hung on hand; the reform of the courts of justice, which 
had been pressed by the army, failed before the obstacles thrown 
in its way by the lawyers in the Commons. "Relieve the op- 
pressed," Cromwell wrote from Dunbar, "hear the groans of poor 
prisoners. Be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions. If 
there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that 
suits not a Commonwealth." But the Parliament was seeking to 
turn the current of public opinion in favor of its own continuance 
by a great diplomatic triumph. It resolved secretly on the wild 
project of bringing about a union between England and Holland, 
and it took advantage of Cromwell's victory to dispatch Oliver 
St. John with a stately embassy to the Hague. His rejection of 
the alliance and treaty of commerce which the Dutch offered were 
followed by the disclosure of the English proposal of union ; but 
the proposal was at once rejected. The envoys, who returned an- 
grily to the Parliament, attributed their failure to the posture of 
affairs in Scotland, where Charles was preparing for a new cam- 
paign. "I believe the King will set up on his own score now," 
Cromwell had written after Dunbar. Humiliation after humilia- 
tion had been heaped on Charles since he landed in his northern 
realm. Pie had subscribed to the Covenant; he had listened to 
sermons and scoldings from the ministers ; he had been called on 
to sign a declaration that acknowledged the tyranny of his father 
and fhe idolatry of his mother. Hardened and shameless as he 
was, the young King for a moment recoiled. " I could never look 
my mother in the face again," he cried, " after signing such a paper;" 



VIII. ] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



661 



bat he signed. He was still, however, a king only in name, shut 
out from the Council and the army, with his friends excluded from 
all part in government or the war. But he was at once freed by 
the victory of Dunbar. With the overthrow of Leslie fell the 
power of Argyle and the narrow Presbyterians whom he led. 
Hamilton, the brother and successor of the Duke who had been 
captured at Preston, brought back the Royalists to the camp, and 
Charles insisted on taking part in the Council and on being crown- 
ed at Scone. Master of Edinburgh, but foiled in an attack on 
Stirling, Cromwell waited through the winter and the long spring, 
while intestine feuds broke up the nation opposed to him, and 
while the stricter Covenanters retired sulkily from the Royal army 
on the return of the " Malignants," the "Royalists" of the earlier 
war, to its ranks. With summer the campaign recommenced, but 
Leslie again fell back on his system of positions, and Cromwell, 
finding his camp at Stirling unassailable, crossed into Fife and left 
the road oj^en to the south. The bait was taken. Li spite of 
Leslie's counsels, Charles resolved to invade England, and was 
soon in full march through Lancashire upon the Severn, with the 
English horse under Lambert hanging on his rear, and the English 
foot hastening to close the road to London by York and Coven- 
try. " We have done to the best of our judgment," Cromwell re- 
plied to the angry alarm of the Parliament, " knowing that if some 
issue were not put to this business it would occasion another win- 
ter's war." At Coventry he learned Charles's position, and swept 
around by Evesham upon Worcester, Avhere the Scotch King was 
encamped. Throwing half his force across the river, Cromwell 
attacked the town on both sides on the anniversary of his victory 
at Dunbar. He led the van in person, and was " the first to set 
foot on the enemy's ground." When Charles descended from the 
cathedral tower to fling himself on the eastern division, Cromwell 
hurried over the river, and was soon " riding in the midst of the 
fire." "For four or five hours," he told the Parliament, " it was as 
stiff a contest as ever I have seen ;" the Scots, outnumbered and 
beaten into the city, gave no answer but shot to offers of quarter, 
and it was not till night-fall that all was over. The loss of the 
victors was as usual inconsiderable. The conquered lost six thou- 
sand men, and all their baggage and artillery. Leslie was among 
the prisoners ; Hamilton among the dead. 

"Now that the King is dead and his son defeated," Cromwell 
said gravely to the Parliament, "I think it necessary to come "to 
a settlement." But the settlement which had been promised 
after Naseby was still as distant as ever after Worcester. The 
bill for dissolving the present Parliament, though Cromwell press- 
ed it in person, was only passed, after bitter opposition, by a 
majority of two ; and even this success had been purchased by 
a compromise which permitted the House to sit for three years 
more. Internal affairs were simply at a dead lock. The Parlia- 
ment appointed committees to prepare plans for legal reforms, or 
for ecclesiastical reforms, but it did nothing to ^arry them into 
effect. It was overpowered by the crowd of affairs which the 



562 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



confusion of the war had thrown into its hands — by confiscations, 
sequestrations, appointments to civil and military offices, the 
whole administration, in fact, of the State ; and there were times 
when it was driven to a resolve not to take any private affairs 
for weeks together in order that it might make some progress 
with public business. To add to this confusion and muddle, there 
were the inevitable scandals which arose from it ; charges of 
malversation and corruption were hurled at the members of the 
House ; and some, like Haslerig, were accused with justice of us- 
ing their power to further their own interests. The one remedy 
for all this was, as the army saw, the assembly of a new and 
complete Parliament in place of the mere "rumj)" of the old; 
but this was the one measure which the House was resolute to 
avei-t. Vane spurred it to a new activity. The Amnesty Bill 
was forced through after fifteen divisions. A Grand Committee, 
with Sir Matthew Hale at its head, was appointed to consider the 
reform of the law. The union with Scotland was pushed reso- 
lutely forward; eight English Commissioners convoked a Conven- 
tion of delegates from its counties and boroughs .at Edinburgh, 
and in spite of dogged opposition procured a vote in favor of 
union. A bill was introduced ratifying the measure, and admit- 
ting representatives from Scotland into the next Parliament. A 
similar plan was soon proposed for a union with Ireland. But it 
was necessary for Vane's purjjoses not only to show the energy 
of the Parliament, but to free it from the control of the army. 
His aim was to raise in the navy a force devoted to the House, 
and to eclipse the glories of Dunbar and Worcester by yet greater 
triumphs at sea. With this view the quarrel with Holland had 
been carefully nursed : a " Navigation Act " prohibiting the im- 
portation in foreign vessels of any but the products of the coun- 
tries to which they belonged struck a fatal blow at the carrying 
trade from which the Dutch drew their wealth; and fresh debates 
arose from the English claim to salutes from all vessels in the 
Channel. The two fleets met before Dover, and a summons from 
Blake to lower the Dutch flag was met by the Dutch admiral, 
Van Tromp,with a broadside. The States-General attributed the 
collision to accident, and ofiTered to recall Van Tromp; but the 
English demands rose at each step in the negotiations until war 
became inevitable. The army hardly needed the warning con- 
veyed by the introduction of a bill for its disbanding to under- 
stand the new policy of the Parliament. It was significant that, 
while accepting the bill for its own dissolution, the House had as 
yet prepared no plan for the assembly which was to follow it ; 
and the Dutch war had hardly been declared when, abandoning 
the attitude of iaaction which it had observed since the beginning 
of the Commonwealth, the army petitioned not only for reform in 
Church and State, but for an explicit declaration that the House 
would bring its proceedings to a close. The Petition forced the 
House to discuss a bill for "a New Representative," but the dis- 
cussion soon brought out the resolve of the sitting members to 
continue as a part of the coming Parliament without re-election. 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



563 



The officers, irritated by such a claim, demanded in conference after 
conference an immediate dissolution, and the House as resolutely 
refused. In ominous words Cromwell supported the demands of the 
army. "As for the members of this Parliament, the army begins to 
take them in disgust. I would it did so with less reason." There 
was just ground, he urged, for discontent in their selfish greed of 
houses and lands, the scandalous lives of many, their partiality as 
judges, their interference with the ordinary course of law in mat- 
ters of private interest, their delay of law reform, above all in 
their manifest design of perpetuating their own power. " There 
is little to hope for from such men," he ended with a return to his 
predominant thought, "for a settlement of the nation." 

The crisis w^as averted for a moment by the events of the war. 
A terrible storm had separated the two fleets when on the point 
of engaging in the Orkneys, but Ruyter and Blake met again in 
the Channel, and after a fierce struggle the Dutch were forced to 
retire under cover of night. Since the downfall of Spain Holland 
had been the first naval power in the world, and the spirit of the 
nation rose gallantly with its earliest defeat. Immense efibrts 
were made to strengthen the fleet, and the veteran Van Tromp, 
Avho was replaced at its head, appeared in the Channel with 
seventy-three ships of war. Blake had but half the number, 
but he at once accepted the challenge, and the unequal fight 
went on doggedly until night-fall, when the English fleet withdrew 
shattered into the Thames. Tromp swept the Channel in triumph, 
Avith a broom at his masthead; and the tone of the House lowered 
with the defeat of their favorite force. A compromise seems to 
have been arranged between the two parties, for the bill provid- 
ing a new Representative was again pushed on ; and the Parlia- 
ment agreed to retire in* the coming November, while Cromwell 
ofiered no opposition to a reduction of the army. But the cour- 
age of the House rose again with a turn of fortune. The strenu- 
ous efibrts of Blake enabled him again to put to sea in a few months 
after his defeat, and a running fight through four days ended at 
last in an English victory, though Tromp's fine seamanship en- 
abled him to save the convoy he was guarding. The House at 
once insisted on the retention of its power. Not only were the 
existing members to continue as members of the New Parliament, 
depriving the places they represented of their right of choosing 
representatives, but they were to constitute a Committee of Re- 
vision, to determine the validity of each election, and the fitness 
of the members returned. A conference took place between the 
leaders of the Commons and the officers of the army, who reso- 
lutely demanded not only the omission of these clauses, but that 
the Parliament should at once dissolve itself, and commit the 
new elections to the Council of State. " Our charge," retorted 
Haslerig, "can not be transferred to any one." The conference 
was adjourned till the next morning, on an understanding that no 
decisive step should be taken ; but it had no sooner reassembled, 
than the absence of the leading members confirmed the news that 
Vane was fast pressing the bill for a new Representative through 



564 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the House. "It is contrary to common honesty," Cromwell an- 
grily broke out ; and, quitting Whitehall, he summoned a company 
of musketeers to follow him as far as the door of the Commons. 
He sat down quietly in his place, " clad in plain gray clothes and 
gray Avorsted stockings," and listened to Vane's passionate argu- 
ments. "I am come to do Avhat grieves me to the heart," he said 
to his neighbor, St. John, but be still remained quiet, till Vane 
pressed the House to waive its usual forms and jDass the bill at 
once. " The time has come," he said to Harrison. " Think well," 
replied Harrison ; " it is a dangerous work !" and Cromwell list- 
ened for another quarter of an hour. At the question " that this 
Bill do pass," he at length rose, and his tone grew higher as he 
repeated his former charges of injustice, self-interest, and delay. 
"Your hour is come," he ended ; " the Lord hath done with you !" 
A crowd of members started to their feet in angry protest. 
"Come, come," replied Cromwell, " we have had enough of this;" 
and, striding into the midst of the chamber, he clapped his hat on 
his head, and exclaimed, " I will jDut an end to your prating !" In 
the din that followed his voice was heard in broken sentences — 
"It is not fit that you should sit here any longer! You should 
give place to better men ! You are no Parliament." Thirty mus- 
keteers entered at a sign from their general, and the fifty members 
present crowded to the door. " Drunkard !" Cromwell broke out 
as Wentworth passed him ; and Martyn was taunted with a yet 
coarser name. Vane, fearless to the last, told him his act was 
"against all right and all honor." "Ah, Sir Harry Vane, Sir 
Harry Vane," Cromwell retorted in bitter indignation at the trick 
he had been played. " You might have prevented all this, bi,it 
you are a juggler, and have no common honesty! The Lord de- 
liver me from Sir Harry Vane !" The Speaker refused to quit his 
seat, till Harrison ofiered. to " lend him a hand to come down." 
Cromwell lifted the mace from the table. " What shall we do 
with this bauble ?" he said. " Take it away !" The door of the 
House was locked at last, and the dispersion of the Parliament was 
followed a few hours after by that of its executive committee, the 
Council of State. Cromwell himself summoned them to withdraw. 
" We have heard," replied a member, John Bradshaw, " what you 
have done this morning at the House, and in some hours all En- 
gland will hear it. But you mistake, sir, if you think the Parlia- 
ment dissolved, No power on earth can dissolve the Parliament 
but itself, be sure of that !" 



Section X.— Tlie Fall of Puritanism. 1653—1660. 

{^Authorities. — Many of the works mentioned before are still valuable, but the 
real key to the history of this period lies in Cromwell's remarkable series of Speech- 
es (Carlyle, "Letters and Speeches," vol. iii.). Thurloe's State Papers furnish an 
immense mass of documents. For the Second Parliament of the Protector we have 
Burton's " Diary." M. Guizot's " Cromwell and the Eepublic " is the best modern 
account of the time, and especially valuable for the foreign transactions of the Pro- 
tectorate. For the Restoration, see his "Richard Cromwell and the Restoration," 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



565 



Ludlow's "Memoirs," Baxter's "Autobiography," and the Clarendon State Pa- 
pers, with the minute and accurate account given by Clarendon himself.] 



The dispersion both of the Parliament and of its executive com- 
mission left England without a government, for the authority of 
every official ended with that of the body from which his power 
was derived. Cromwell, in fact, as Captain-General of the forces, 
found himself left solely responsible for the maintenance of public 
order. But no thought of military despotism can be fairly traced 
in the acts of the general or the army. They were, in fact, far 
from regarding their position as a revolutionary one. Though 
incapable of justification on any formal ground, their proceedings 
had as yet been substantially in vindication of the older constitu- 
tion, and the opinion of the nation had gone fully Avith the army 
in its demand for a full and efficient body of representatives, as 
well as in its resistance to the project by which the Rump would 
have deprived half England of its rights of election. It was only 
when no other means existed of preventing such a wrong that the 
soldiers had driven out the wrong -doers. "It is you that have 
forced me to this," Cromwell exclaimed, as he drove the members 
from the House; "I have sought the Lord night and day that he 
would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work." 
The act was one of violence to the members of the House, but the 
act which it aimed at preventing was one of violence on their part 
to the constitutional rights of the whole nation. The people had 
in fact been "dissatisfied in every corner of the realm" at the state 
of public affairs ; and the expulsion of the members was ratified 
by a general assent. " We did not hear a dog bark at their go- 
ing," the Protector said years afterward. Whatever anxiety 
may have been felt at the use which was like to be made of " the 
power of the sword" was at once dispelled by a proclamation of 
the officers. Their one anxiety Avas " not to grasp the power our- 
selves nor to keep it in military hands, no not for a day," and their 
promise to " call to the government men of approved fidelity and 
honesty" was redeemed by the nomination of a new Council of 
State, consisting of eight officers of high rank and four civilians, 
Avith CromAvell as their head, and a seat in Avhich Avas oflered, 
though fruitlessly, to Vane. The first business of such a body 
was clearly to siimmon a ncAV Parliament, and to resign its trust 
into its hands; but the bill for Parliamentary reform had dropped 
with the expulsion, and, reluctant as the Council Avas to summon 
the ncAV Parliament on the old basis of election, it shrank from the 
responsibility of effecting so fundamental a change as the creation 
of a new basis by its own authority. It was this difficulty Avhich 
led to the expedient of a Constituent Convention. CromAvell told 
the story of this unlucky assembly some years after Avith an amus- 
ing frankness. "I Avill come and tell you a story of my own weak- 
ness and folly. And yet it Avas done in my simplicity — I dare 
avoAv it was. ... It was thought then that men of our own judg- 
ment, who had fought in the wars, and were all of a piece on that 



566 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



account — why, surely, these men will hit it, and these men Avill do 
it to the purpose, whatever can be desired ! And surely we did 
think, and I did think so — the more blame to me !" Of the hun- 
dred and fifty-six men, " faithful, fearing God, and hating covet- 
ousness," whose names were selected for this purpose by the Coun- 
cil of State from lists furnished by the Congregational Churches, 
the bulk were men, like Ashley Cooper, of good blood and "free 
estates ;" and the proportion of burgesses, such as the leather-mer- 
chant, Praise-God Barebones, whose name was eagerly seized on 
as a nickname for the body to which he belonged, seems to have 
been much the same as in earlier Parliaments. But the circum- 
stances of their choice told fatally on the temper of its members. 
Cromwell himself, in the burst of rugged eloquence with which 
he welcomed their assembling, was carried away by a strange en- 
thusiasm. " Convince the nation," he said, " that as men fearing 
God have fought them out of their bondage under the regal power, 
so men fearing God do now rule them in the fear of God. . . . Own 
your call, for it is of God : indeed, it is marvelous, and it hath 
been unprojected. . . . Never was a supreme power under such a 
way of owning God and being owned by him." A spirit yet morQ 
enthusiastic at once appeared in the proceedings of the Conven- 
tion. The resignation of their powers by Cromwell and the Coun- 
cil into its hands left it the one supreme authority ; but by the 
instrument which convoked it provision had been made that this 
authority should be transferred in fifteen months to another as- 
sembly elected according to its directions. Its work was, in fact, 
to be that of a constituent assembly, paving the way for a Parlia- 
ment on a really national basis; but the Convention put the largest 
construction on its commission, and boldly undertook the whole 
task of constitutional reform. Committees were appointed to con- 
sider the needs of the Church and the nation. The spirit of econ- 
omy and honesty which pervaded the assembly appeared in its 
redress of the extravagance which prevailed in the civil service, 
and of the inequality of taxation, "With a remarkable energy it 
undertook a host of reforms, for whose execution England has had 
to wait to our own day. The Long Parliament had shrunk from 
any reform of the Court of Chancery, where twenty-three thousand 
cases were waiting unheard. The Convention proposed its aboli- 
tion. The work of compiling a single code of laws, begun under 
the Long Parliament by a committee with Sir Matthew Hale_ at 
its head, was again pushed forward. The frenzied alarm which 
these bold measures aroused among the lawyer class was soon 
backed by that of the clergy, who saw their wealth menaced by 
the establishment of civil marriage, and by proposals to substitute 
the free contributions of congregations for the payment of tithes. 
The landed proprietors, too, rose against the scheme for the aboli- 
tion of lay-patronage, which was favored by the Convention, and 
predicted an age of confiscation. The "Barebones Parliament," 
as the assembly was styled in derision, was charged with a design 
to ruin property, the Church, and the law, with enmity to knowl- 
edsre, and a blind and io-noraut fanaticism. Cromwell himself 



VIII. ] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



667 



shared the general uneasiness at its proceedings. His mind was 
that of an administrator, rather than that of a statesman, unspec- 
ulative, deficient in foresight, conservative, and eminently practi- 
cal. He saw the need of administrative reform in Church and 
State ; but he had no sympathy whatever with the revolutionary 
theories which were filling the air around him. His desire was 
for " a settlement," which should be accompanied with as little 
disturbance of the old state of things as possible. If Monarchy 
had vanished in the turmoil of war, his experience of the Long 
Parliament only confirmed him in his belief of the need of estab- 
lishing an executive power of a similar kind, apart from the power 
of the Legislature, as a condition of civil liberty. His sword had 
won " liberty of conscience ;" but, passionately as he clung to it, 
he was still for an established Church, for a parochial system, and 
a ministry maintained by tithes. His social tendencies were sim- 
ply those of the class to which he belonged. "I was by birth a 
gentleman," he told a later Parliament, and in the old social ar- 
rangement of "a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman," he saw "a 
good interest of the nation and a great one." He hated " that 
leveling principle " which tended to the reducing of all to one 
equality. "What was the purport of it," he asks with an amus- 
ing simplicity, " but to make the tenant as liberal in future as the 
landlord ?" 

To a practical temper such as this the speculative reforms of the 
Convention were as distasteful as to the lawyers and clergy whom 
they attacked. " Nothing," said Cromwell, " was in the hearts of 
these men but 'overturn, overturn.'" But he was delivered from 
Lis embarrassment by the internal dissensions of the Assembly it- 
self The day after the decision against tithes, the more conserva- 
tive members snatched a vote by surprise " that the sitting of this 
Parliament any longer, as now constituted, will not be for the 
good of the Commonwealth, and that it is requisite to deliver up 
unto the Lord-General the powers we received from him." The 
Speaker placed their abdication in Cromwell's hands, and the act 
was confirmed by the subsequent adhesion of a majority of the 
members. The dissolution of the Convention replaced matters in 
the state in which its assembly had found them ; but there was 
still the same general anxiety to substitute some sort of legal rule 
for the power of the sword. The Convention had named during 
its session a fresh Council of State, and this body at once drew up, 
tinder the name of the Instrument of Government, a remarkable 
Constitution, which was adopted by the Council of Ofiicers. They 
were driven by necessity to the step from which they had shrunk 
before, that of convening a Parliament on the reformed basis of 
representation. The House was to consist of four hundred mem- 
bers from England, thirty from Scotland, and thirty from Ireland. 
The seats hitherto assigned to small and rotten boroughs were 
transferred to larger constituencies, and for the most part to coun- 
ties. All special rights of voting in the electioii of members were 
abolished, and replaced by a general right of suflfrage, based on 
the possession of real or personal property to the A'alue of two hun-. 



568 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



dred pounds. Catholics and "Malignants," as those who had 
fought for the King were called, were alone excluded from the 
franchise. Constitutionally, all further organization of the form 
of government should have been left to this Assembly ; but the 
dread of disorder during the interval of its election, as well as a 
longing for " settlement," drove the Council to complete their 
work by pressing the office of "Protector" upon Cromwell. "They 
told me that except I would undertake the government, they 
thought things would hardly come to a composure or settlement, 
but blood and confusion would break in as before." If we follow, 
however, his own statement, it was when they urged that the ac- 
ceptance of such a Protectorate actually limited his power as 
Lord-General, and " boixnd his hands to act nothing without the 
consent of a Council until the Parliament," that the post was ac- 
cepted. The powers of the new Protector indeed were strictly 
limited. Though the members of the Council were originally 
named by him, each member was irremovable save by consent 
of the rest ; their advice was necessary in all foreign afiairs, their 
consent in matters of peace and war, their appi-oval in nomina- 
tions to the great offices of State, or the disposal of the military or 
civil power. With this body, too, lay the choice of all future Pro- 
tectors. To the administrative check of the Council was added 
the political check of the Parliament. Three years at the most 
were to elapse between the assembling of one Parliament and an- 
other. Laws could not be made nor taxes imposed but by its au- 
thority, and after the lapse of twenty days the statutes it passed 
became laws even if the Protector's assent were refused to them. 
The new Constitution was undoubtedly popular ; and the promise 
of a real Parliament in a few months covered the want of any 
legal character in the new rule. The government was generally 
accepted as a provisional one, which could only acquire legal au- 
thority from the ratification of its acts in the coming session ; 
and the desire to settle it on such a Parliamentary basis was uni- 
versal among the members of the new Assembly which met in 
the autumn at Westminster. 

Few Parliaments have ever been more memorable, or more 
truly representative of the English people, than the Parliament 
of 1654. It was the first Parliament in our history Avhere mem- 
bers from Scotland and Ireland sat side by side with those from 
England, as they sit in the Parliament of to-day. The members 
for rotten boroughs and pocket-boroughs had disappeared. In 
spite of the exclusion of the Royalists from the polling-booths, and 
the arbitrary erasure of the names of a few ultra-Republican mem- 
bers by the Council, the House had a better title to the name of a 
"free Parliament" than any which had sat before. The freedom 
with which the electors had exercised their right of voting Avas 
seen indeed in the large number of Presbyterian members Avho 
were returned, and in the reappearance of Haslerig and Bradshaw, 
with many members of the Long Parliament, side by side with 
Lord Herbert and the older Sir Harry Vane. The first business of 
the House was clearly to consider the question of government ; and 



VIII. ] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



569 



Haslei-ig, with the fiercer Republicans, at once denied the legal ex- 
istence of either Council or Protector, on the ground that the Long 
Parliament had never been dissolved. Such an argument, how- 
ever, told as much against the Parliament in which they sat as 
against the administration itself, and the bulk of the Assembly 
contented themselves with declining to recognize the Constitution 
or the Protectorate as of more than provisional validity. They 
proceeded at once to settle the government on a Parliamentary 
basis. The " Instrument " was taken as the groundwork of the 
new Constitution, and carried clause by clause. That Cromwell 
should retain his rule as Protector was unanimously agreed ; that 
he should possess the right of veto or a co-ordinate legislative 
power with the Parliament was hotly debated, though the violent 
language of Haslerig did little to disturb the general tone of mod- 
eration. Suddenly, however, Cromwell interposed. If he had un- 
dertaken the duties of Protector with reluctance, he looked on all 
legal defects in his title as more than supplied by the general ac- 
ceptance of the nation. " I called not myself to this place," he 
urged; " God and the people of these kingdoms have borne testi- 
mony to it." His rule had been accepted by London, by the army, 
by the solemn decision of the judges, by addresses from every 
shire, by the very appearance of the members of the Parliament in 
answer to his writ. " Why may I not balance this Providence," 
he asked, " with any hereditary interest?" In this national approv- 
al he saw a call from God, a Divine Right of a higher order than 
that of the kings who had gone before. But there was another 
ground for the anxiety with which he watched the proceedings of 
the Commons. His passion for administration had far overstepped 
the bounds of a merely provisional rule in the interval before the 
assembling of the Parliament. His desire for " settlement " had 
been strengthened not only by the drift of public opinion, but by 
the urgent need of every day ; and the power reserved by the 
" Instrument " to issue temporary Ordinances, " until further or- 
der in such matters, to be taken by the Parliament," gave a scope 
to his marvelous activity of which he at once took advantage. 
Sixty-four Ordinances had been issued in the nine months befoi'e 
the meeting of the Parliament. Peace had been concluded with Hol- 
land. The Church had been set in order. The law itself had 
been minutely regulated. The union with Scotland had been 
brought to completion. So far was Cromwell from dreaming that 
these measures, or the authority which enacted them, would be 
questioned, that he looked to Parliament simply to complete his 
work. " The great end of your meeting," he said at the first as- 
sembly of its members, "is healing and settling." Though he had 
himself done much, he added, " there was still much to be done." 
Peace had to be made with Portugal and alliance Avith Spain. 
Bills were laid before the House for the codification of the law. 
The plantation and settlement of Ireland had still to be completed. 
He resented the setting those projects aside for constitutional 
questions which, as he held, a divine call had decided ; but he re- 
sented yet more the renewed claim advanced by Parliament to the 



570 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



sole power of legislation. As we have seen, his experience of the 
evils which had arisen from the concentration of legislative and 
executive power in the Long Parliament had convinced Cromwell 
of the danger to public liberty which lay in such a iinion. He 
saw in the joint government of " a single pei'son and a Parliament" 
the only assurance " that Parliaments should not make themselves 
perpetual," or that their power should not be perverted to public 
wrong. JBut whatever strength there may have been in the Pro- 
tector's arguments, the act by which he proceeded to enforce them 
was fatal to liberty, and in the end to Puritanism. " If my call- 
ing be from God," he ended, " and my testimony from the people, 
God and the people shall take it from me, else I will not part from 
it." And he announced that no member would be suffered to en- 
ter the House without signing an engagement " not to alter the 
government as it is settled in a single person and a Parliament." 
No act of the Stuarts had been a bolder defiance of constitutional 
law ; and the act was as needless as it was illegal. One hundred 
members alone refused to take the engagement, and the signatures 
of three fourths of the House proved that the security Cromwell 
desired might have been easil}'" procured by a vote of Parliament. 
But those who remained resumed their constitutional task with un- 
broken firmness. They quietly asserted their sole title to govern- 
ment by referring the Protector's Ordinances to Committees for 
revision, and for conversion into laws. The " Instrument of Gov- 
ernment " Avas turned into a bill, debated, and read a third time. 
Money votes, as in previous Parliaments, were deferred till "gi-iev- 
ances" had been settled. But Cromwell once more intervened. 
The Royalists were astir again ; and he attributed their renewed 
hopes to the hostile attitude which he attributed to the Parlia- 
ment. The army, which remained unpaid while the supplies were 
delayed, was seething with discontent. " It looks," said the Pro- 
tector, " as if the laying grounds for a quarrel had rather been de- 
signed than to give the people settlement. Judge yourselves 
whether the contesting of things that were provided for by this 
government hath been profitable expense of time for the good of 
this nation," In words of angry reproach he declared the Parlia- 
ment dissolved. 

With the dissolution of the Parliament of 1654 ended all show 
of legal rule. The Protectorate, deprived by its own act of all 
chance of legal sanction, became a simple tyranny. Cromwell pro- 
fessed, indeed, to be restrained by the " Instrument ;" but the one 
great restraint on his power which the Instrument provided, the 
inability to levy taxes save by consent of Parliament, was set aside 
on the plea of necessity. "The people," said the Protector in 
words which Strafford might have uttered, " will prefer their real 
security to forms," That a danger of Royalist revolt existed was 
undeniable, but the danger was at once doubled by the general 
discontent. From this moment, Whitelock tells us, "many sober 
and noble patriots," in desj^air of public libei'ty, " did begin to in- 
cline to the King's restoration." In the mass of the population 
the reaction was far more rapid. " Charles Stuart," writes a 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



571 



Cheshire correspondent to the Secretary of State, "hath five hun- 
dred friends in these adjacent counties for every one friend to you 
among them." But before the overpowering strength of the army 
even this general discontent was powerless. Yorkshire, where the 
Royalist insurrection was expected to be most formidable, never 
ventured to rise at all. There were risings in Devon, Dorset, and 
the Welsh Marches, but they were quickly put down, and their 
leaders brought to the scaffold. Easily however as the revolt was 
suppressed, the terror of the government was seen in the enei*- 
getic measures to which Cromwell resorted in the hope of secur- 
ing order. The country was divided into ten military govern- 
ments, each with a major-general at its head, who was empowered 
to disarm all Papists and Royalists, and to arrest suspected per- 
sons. Funds for the support of this military despotism were pro- 
vided by an Ordinance of the Council of State, which enacted that 
all who had at any time borne arms for the King should pay every 
year a tenth part of their income, in spite of the Act of Oblivion, 
as a fine for their Royalist tendencies. The despotism of the 
major-generals was seconded by the older expedients of tyranny. 
The Episcopalian clergy had been zealous in promoting. the insur- 
rection, and they were forbidden in revenge to act as ministers or 
as tutors. The press was placed under a strict censorship. The 
payment of taxes levied by the sole authority of the Protector was 
enforced by distraint ; and when a collector was sued in the courts 
for redress, the counsel for the prosecution were sent to the 
Tower. 

If pardon, indeed, could ever be won for a tyranny, the wisdom 
and grandeur with which he used the power he had usurped would 
win pardon for the Protector. The greatest among the many 
great enterprises undertaken by the Long Parliament had been 
the Union of the three Kingdoms ; and that of Scotland with En- 
gland had been brought about, at the very end of its career, by 
the tact and vigor of Sir Harry Vane. But its practical realiza- 
tion was left to Cromwell. In four months of hard fighting Gen- 
eral Monk brought the Highlands to a new tranquillity; and the 
presence of an army of seven thousand men, backed by a line of 
forts, kept the most restless of the clans in good order. The set- 
tlement of the country was brought about by the temperance and 
sagacity of Monk's successor. General Deane. No further inter- 
ference with the Presbyterian system was attempted beyond the 
suppression of the General Assembly. But religious liberty -yvas 
resolutely protected, and Deane ventured even to interfere on be- 
half of the miserable victims whom Scotch bigotry was torturing 
and burning on the charge of witchcraft. Even steady Royalists 
acknowledged the justice of the government and the wonderful 
discipline of its troops. " We always reckon those eight years 
of the usurpation," said Burnet afterward, " a time of great peace 
and prosperity." Sterner work had to be done before Ireland 
could be brought into real union with its sister kingdoms. The 
work of conquest had been continued by Ireton, and completed 
after his death by General Ludlow, as mercilessly as it had be- 



572 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



gun. Thousands perished by famine or the sword. Shipload after 
shipload of those who surrendered were sent over-sea for sale into 
forced labor in Jamaica and the West Indies. More than forty- 
thousand of the beaten Catholics were permitted to enlist for for- 
eign service, and found a refuge in exile under the banners of 
France and Spain. The work of settlement, which was undertaken 
by Henry Cromwell, the younger and abler of the Protector's 
sons, turned out to be even more terrible than the work of the 
sword. It took as its model the Colonization of Ulster, the fatal 
measure which had destroyed all hope of a united Ireland, and had 
brought inevitably in its train the massacre and the war. The 
people were divided into classes in the order of their assumed 
guilt. All who after fair trial were proved to have jDcrsonally 
taken part in the massacre were sentenced to banishment or 
death. The general amnesty which freed " those of the meaner 
sort" from all question on other scores was far from extending 
to the landowners. Catholic proprietors who had shown no good- 
will to the Parliament, even though they had taken no part in the 
war, were punished by the forfeiture of a third of their estates. 
All who had borne arms were held to have forfeited the whole, 
and driven into Connaught, where fresh estates w^ere carved out 
for them from the lands of the native clans. No such doom bad 
ever fallen on a nation in modern times as fell upon Ireland in its 
new settlement. Among the bitter memories which part Ireland 
from England, the memory of the bloodshed and confiscation which 
the Puritans wrought remains the bitterest; and the worst curse 
an Irish peasant can hurl at his enemy is " the curse of Crom-^ 
well." But pitiless as the Protector's policy was, it was success- 
ful in the ends at which it aimed. The whole native population 
lay helpless and crushed. Peace and order were restored, and a 
large incoming of Protestant settlers from England and Scotland 
brought a new prosperity to the wasted country. Above all, the 
legislative union which had been brought about with Scotland 
was now carried out with Ireland, and thirty seats were allotted 
to its ref)resentatives in the general Parliament. 

In England Cromwell dealt with the Royalists as irreconcilable 
enemies ; but in every other respect he carried fairly out his pledge 
of " healing and settling." The series of administrative reforms 
planned by the Convention had been partially carried into effect 
before the meeting of Parliament in 1654; but the work Avas 
pushed on after the dissolution of the House with yet greater 
energy. Nearly a hundred Ordinances showed the industry of 
the government. Police, public amusements, ro;ids, finances, the 
condition of prisons, the imprisonment of debtors, were a few 
among the subjects which claimed Cromwell's attention. An Or- 
dinance of more than fifty clauses reformed the Court of Chancery. 
The anarchy which had reigned in the Church since the break- 
down of Episcopacy and the failure of the Presbyterian system to 
supply its place was put an end to by a series of wise and tem- 
perate measures for its reorganization. Rights of patronage were 
left untouched ; but a Board of Triers, a fourth of whom were 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



673 



laymen, was appointed to examine the fitness of ministers pre- 
sented to livings ; and a Church board of gentry and clergy was 
set up in every county to exercise a supervision over ecclesiastical 
affairs, and to detect and remove scandalous and ineffectual min- 
isters. Even by the confession of Cromwell's oj^ponents, the plan 
worked well. It furnished the country with " able, serious preach- 
ers," Baxter tells us, " who lived a godly life, of what tolerable 
opinion soever they were," and, as both Presbyterian and Inde- 
pendent ministers were presented to livings at the will of their 
patrons, it solved so far as practical working was concerned the 
problem of a religious union among Protestants on the base of a 
wide variety of Christian opinion. From the Church which was 
thus reorganized all power of interference with faiths differing 
from its own was resolutely withheld. Cromwell remained true 
throughout to his great cause of religious liberty. Even the 
Quaker, rejected by all other Christian bodies as an anarchist and 
blasphemer, found sympathy and protection in Cromwell. The 
Jews had been excluded from England since the reign of Edward 
the First; and a prayer which they now presented for leave to 
return was refused by a commission of merchants and divines to 
whom the Protector referred it for consideration. But the re- 
fusal was quietly passed over, and the connivance of Cromwell in 
the settlement of a few Hebrews in London and Oxford was so 
clearly understood that no one ventured to interfere with them. 

No part of his policy is more characteristic of Cromwell's mind, 
whether in its strength or in its weakness, than his management 
of foreign affairs. While England had been absorbed in her long 
and obstinate struggle for freedom the whole face of the world 
around her had changed. The Thirty -Yeai's' War was over. The 
victories of Gustavus, and of the Swedish generals who followed 
him, had been seconded by the policy of Richelieu and the inter- 
vention of France. Protestantism in Germany was no longer in 
peril from the bigotry or ambition of the House of Austria ; and 
the Treaty of Westphalia had drawn a permanent line between 
the territories belonging to the adherents of the old religion and 
the new. There was little danger, indeed, now to Europe from 
the great Catholic House which had threatened its freedom ever 
since Charles the Fifth. Its Austrian branch was called away 
from dreams of aggression in the west to a desperate struggle 
with the Turk for the possession of Hungary and the security of 
Austria itself. Spain, from causes which it is no part of our pres- 
ent story to detail, was falling into a state of strange decrepitude. 
So far from aiming to be mistress of Europe, she was rapidly sink- 
ing into the almost helpless prey of France. It was France which 
had become the dominant power in Christendom, though her po- 
sition was far from being as commanding as it was to become un- 
der Lewis the Fourteenth. The peace and order which prevailed 
after the cessation of the religious troubles throughout her com- 
pact and fertile territory gave "scope at last to the quick and in- 
dustrious temper of the French people; while her Avealth and en- 
ergy was placed by the centralizing administration of Henry the 



574 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Fourth, of Richelieu, and of Mazarin, almost absolutely in the 
hands of the Crown. Under the three great rulers who have just 
been named, her ambition was steadily directed to the same pur- 
pose of territorial aggrandizement, and though limited as yet to 
the annexation of the Spanish and Imperial territories which still 
parted her frontier from the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Rhine, a 
statesman of wise political genius would have discerned the be- 
ginning of that great struggle for supremacy over Europe at large 
which was only foiled by the genius of Marlborough and the vic- 
tories of the Grand Alliance. But in his view of European pol- 
itics Cromwell was misled by the conservative and unspeculative 
temper of his mind as well as by the strength of his religious en- 
thusiasm. Of the change in the world around him he seems to 
have discerned nothing. He brought to the Europe of Mazarin 
simply the hopes and ideas with which all England was thrilling 
in his youth at the outbreak of the Thirty -Years' War. Spain 
was still to him " the head of the Papal interest," whether at 
home or abroad. " The Papists in England," he said to the Par- 
liament of 1657, "have been accounted, ever since I was boi'n, 
Spaniolized : they never regarded France, or any other Papist 
State, but Spain only." The old English hatred of Spain, the old 
English resentment at the shameful part which the nation had 
been forced to play in the great German struggle by the policy 
of James and of Charles, lived on in Cromwell, and was only 
strengthened by the religious enthusiasm which the success of 
Puritanism had kindled within him. "The Lord himself," he 
wrote to his admirals as they sailed to the "West Indies, "hath a 
controversy with your enemies ; even with that Romish Babylon 
of which the Spaniard is the great underpropper. In that respect 
we fight the Lord's battles." What Sweden had been under Gus- 
tavus, England, Cromwell dreamed, might be now — the head of a 
great Protestant League in the struggle against Catholic aggres- 
sion. " You have on your shoulders," he said to the Parliament 
of 1654, " the interest of all the Christian people of the world. I 
wish it may be written on our hearts to be zealous for that inter- 
est." The first step in such a struggle would necessarily be to 
league the Protestant powers together, and Cromwell's earliest 
efforts were directed to bring the ruinous and indecisive quarrel 
with Holland to an end. The fierceness of the strife had grown 
with each engagement ; but the hopes of Holland fell with her ad- 
miral, Tromp, who received a mortal wound at the moment when 
he had succeeded in forcing the English line ; and the skill and 
energy of his successor, De Ruyter, struggled in vain to restore 
her waning fortunes. She was saved by the expulsion of the 
Long Parliament, which had persisted in its demand of a political 
union of the two countries ; and the new policy of Cromwell was 
seen in the conclusion of peace on a simple pledge from the Dutch 
to compensate English merchants for their losses in the war. The 
peace with Holland Avas followed by the conclusion of like treaties 
with Sweden and with Denmark ; and on the arrival of a Swedish 
, envoy with offers of a league of friendship, Cromwell endeavored 



VUI.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



to bring the Dutch, the Brandenburgors, jiud the Danes into the 
same confederation of the Protestant powers. His efforts in this 
direction, though they never wholly ceased, were foiled for the 
moment; but Cromwell was resolute to kindle again the religious 
strife which had been closed by the Treaty of Westphalia, and he 
seized on a quarrel between the Duke of Savoy and his Protest- 
ant subjects in the valleys of Piedmont as a means of kindling it. 
A ruthless massacre of these Vaudois by the Duke's troojDS had 
roused deep resentment throughout England, a resentment which 
still breathes in the noblest of Milton's sonnets. While the poet 
called on God to avenge his " slaughtered saints whose bones lie 
scattered on the Alpine mountains cold," Cromwell was already 
busy with the work of earthly vengeance. An English envoy ap- 
peared at the Duke's court with haughty demands of redress. 
Their refusal would have been followed by instant war, for the 
Protestant Cantons of Switzerland were bribed into j)romising a 
^orce of ten thousand men for an attack on Savoy ; and how far 
Cromwell expected the flame to spread was seen in his attitude 
toward Spaiji. He had already demanded freedom of trade and 
worship for English merchants in Spanish America; and a fleet 
with three thousand men on board was now secretly dispatched 
against San Domingo. 

As though to announce the outbreak of a world-wide struggle, 
Blake appeared in the Mediterranean, bombarded Algiers, and de- 
stroyed the fleet with which its pirates had ventured through the 
reign of Charles to insult the English coast. The thunder of his 
guns, every Puritan believed, would be heard in the Castle of St. 
Angelo, and Rome itself would have to bow to the greatness of 
Cromwell. But the vast schemes of the Protector every where 
broke down. The cool Italian who ruled France, Cardinal Maza- 
rin, foiled his projects in Piedmont by forcing the Duke of Savoy 
to grant the English demands. Blake, M'ho had sailed to the 
Spanish coast, failed to intercept the treasure fleet from America, 
and the West Indian expedition was foiled in its descent on San 
Domingo. Its conquest of Jamaica, important as it really was in 
breaking through the monopoly of the New World in the South 
which Spain had till now enjoyed, seemed at the time but a poor 
result for the vast expenditure of money and blood. The war which 
the attack on San Domingo necessarily brought on saw the last 
and grandest of the triumphs of England's flrst great admiral. 
Blake found the Plata fleet guarded by galleons in the strongly 
armed harbor of Santa Cruz. He forced an entrance into the har- 
bor, sunk or burned every ship in it, and worked his fleet out again 
in the teeth of a gale. His death, as the fleet touched at Plymouth 
on its return, alone damped the joy at this great victory. But 
Cromwell desired triumphs on land as on sea ; and his desire threw 
him blindfold into the hands of Mazarin, who was engaged on his 
part in the war with Spain which was brought afterward to a 
close in the Treaty of the Pyrenees. Cromwell's demand of Dun- 
kirk, which had long stood in the way of any acceptance of his of- 
fers of aid, was at last conceded; and a detachment of the Puritan 

37 



dT6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



army joined the French troops who were attacking Flanders under 
the command of Turenne. Their valor and discipline was shown 
by the part they took in the victory of the Dunes, a victory which 
forced the Flemish towns to open their gates to the French, and 
gave Dunkirk to Cromwell. 

Never had the fame of England stood higher; and yet never 
had any English ruler committed so fatal a blunder as that of 
Cromwell in aiding the ambition of France. But the errors of his 
foreign policy were small in comparison with the errors of his pol- 
icy at home. The government of the Protector had become a sim- 
ple tyranny, but it was impossible for him to remain content with 
the position of a tyrant. He was as anxious as ever to give a legal 
basis to his administration; and he seized on the Avar as a pretext 
for again summoning a Parliament. But he no longer trusted, as 
in the Parliament of 1654, to perfect freedom of election. The six- 
ty members sent from Ireland and Scotland were simply nominees 
of the government. Its whole influence was exerted to secure 
the return of the more conspicuous members of the Council. All 
Catholics, and all Royalists who had actually fought for the King, 
were still disqualified from voting. It was calculated that of the 
members returned one half were bound to the government by ties 
of profit or place. But Cromwell was still unsatisfied. A certifi- 
cate of the Council was required from each member before admis- 
sion to the House ; and a fourth of the whole number returned — 
one hundred in all, with Haslerig at their head — were by this 
means excluded on grounds of disaffection or want of religion. To 
these arbitrary acts of violence the House replied only by a course 
of singular moderation and wisdom. From the first it disclaimed 
any purpose of opposing the government. One of its earliest 
acts provided securities for Cromwell's person, which was threat- 
ened by constant plots of assassination. • It supported him in his 
war policy, and voted supplies of unprecedented extent for the 
maintenance of the struggle. It was this attitude of loyalty which 
gave force to its steady refusal to sanction the system of tyranny 
which had practically placed England under martial law. In his 
opening address Cromwell boldly took his stand in support of the 
military despotism wielded by the major-generals. "It hath been 
more effectual toward the discounterrancing of vice and settling 
religion than any thing done these fifty years. I will abide by it," 
he said, with singular vehemence, " notwithstanding the envy and 
slander of foolish men. I could as soon venture my life with it as 
with any thing I ever undertook. If it were to be done again, I 
would do it." But no sooner had a bill been introduced into Par- 
liament to confirm the proceedings of the major-generals than a 
long debate showed the temper of the Commons. They had re- 
solved to acquiesce in the Protectorate, but they were, equally re- 
solved to bring it again to a legal mode of government. This in- 
deed was the aim of even Cromwell's wiser adherents. " What 
makes me fear the passing of this Act," one of them wrote to his 
son Henry, " is that thereby His Highness's government will be 
more founded in force, and more removed from that natural foun- 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



5Y7 



elation wbich the people in Parliament are desirous to give hira, 
supposing that he will become more theirs than now he is." The 
bill Avas rejected, and Cromwell bowed to the feeling of the nation 
by withdrawing the powers of the major-generals. But the de- 
feat of the tyranny of the sword was only a step toward a far bold- 
er effort for the restoration of the power of the law. It was no 
mere pedantrj^ still less was it vulgar flattery, which influenced 
the Parliament in their ofier to Cromwell of the title of King. The 
experience of the last few years had taught the nation the value 
of the traditional forms under wliich its liberties had grown up. 
A king was limited by constitutional precedents. "The king's 
prerogative," it was well urged, "is under the courts of justice, 
and is bounded as well as any acre of land, or any thing a man 
hath." A Protector, on the other hand, was new in our history, 
and there were no traditional means of limiting his power. " The 
one ofiice being lawful in its nature," said Glynne, "known to the 
nation, certain in itself, and confined and regulated by the law, 
and the other not so — that was the great ground why the Parlia- 
ment did so much insist on this ofiice and title." Under the name 
of Monarchy, indeed, the question really at issue between the party 
headed by the ofiicers and the party led by the lawyers in the 
Commons was that of the restoration of constitutional and legal 
rule. The proposal was carried by an overwhelming majority, 
but a month passed in endless consultations between the Parlia- 
ment and the Protector. His good sense, his knowledge of the gen- 
eral feeling of the nation, his real desire to obtain a settlement 
which should secure the ends for which Puritanism had fought, 
political and religious liberty, broke, in conference after conference, 
through a mist of words. But his real concern throughout was 
with the temper of the army. To Cromwell his soldiers were no 
common swordsmen. They were " godly men — men that will not 
be beaten down by a worldly and carnal spirit while they keep 
their integrity ;" men in whose general voice he recognized the 
voice of God. "They are honest and faithful men," he urged, 
"true to the great things of the government. And though it 
really is no part of their goodness to be unwilling to submit to 
what a Parliament shall settle over them, yet it is my duty and 
conscience to beg of you that there may be no hard things put 
upon them which they can not swallow. I can not think God 
would bless an undertaking of any thing which M^ould justly and 
with cause grieve them." The temper of the army was soon shown. 
Its leaders, with Lambert, Fleetwood, and Desborough at their 
head, placed their commands in Cromwell's hands. A petition 
from the ofiicers to Parliament demanded the withdrawal of the 
proposal to restore tlie Monarchy, " in the name of the old cause 
for which they had bled." Cromwell at once anticipated the com- 
ing debate on this petition, a debate which might have led to an 
open breach between the army and the Commons, by a refusal of 
the Crown. " I can not undertake this government," he said, 
" with that title of King ; and that is my answer to this great and 
weighty business." 



578 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Disappointed as it was, the Parliament with singular self-re- 
straint turned to other modes of bringing about its purposes. The 
offer of the Crown had been coupled with the condition of accept- 
ing a Constitution which was a modification of the Instrument of 
Government adopted by the Parliament of 1654, and this Consti- 
tution Cromwell emphatically approved. "The things provided 
by this Act of Government," he owned, " do secure the liberties 
of the people of God as they never before have had them." With 
a change of the title of King into that of Protector, the Act of 
Government now became law ; and the solemn inauguration of 
the Protector by the Parliament was a practical acknowledgment 
on the part of Cromwell of the illegality of his former rule. In 
the name of the Commons the Speaker invested him with a mantle 
of State, placed the sceptre in his hand, and girt tlie sword of jus- 
tice by his side. By the new Act of Government Cromwell was 
allowed to name his own successor, but in all after cases the ofiice 
was to be an elective one. In every other respect the forms of 
the older Constitution were carefully restored. Parliament was 
again to consist of two Houses, the seventy members of " the oth- 
er House " being named by the Protector. The Commons regained 
their old right of exclusively deciding on the qualification of their 
members. Parliamentary restrictions were imposed on the choice 
of members of the Council, and oflicers of State or of tlie army. 
A fixed revenue was voted to the Protector, and it was provided 
tliat no moneys should be raised but by assent of Parliament. 
Liberty of Avorship was secured for all but Papists, Prelatists, So- 
cinians, or those who denied the inspiration of the Scriptures; and 
liberty of conscience was secured for all. 

The excluded members were again admitted when the Parlia- 
ment reassembled after an adjournment of six months ; and the 
hasty act of Cromwell in giving his nominees in " the other 
House " the title of Lords kindled a quarrel which was busily 
fanned by Haslerig. But while the Houses were busy with their 
squabble the hand of death was falling on the Protector. He had 
long been weary of his task. " God knows," he burst out a little 
time before to the Parliament, "I would have been glad to have 
lived under my woodside, and to have kept a flock of sheep, 
rather than to have undertaken this government," And now to 
the weariness of power was added the weakness and feverish im- 
patience of disease. Vigorous and energetic as his life had seemed, 
his health was by no means as strong as his will ; he had been 
struck down by intermittent fever in the midst of his triumphs 
both in Scotland and in Ireland, and during the past year he had 
suffered from repeated attacks of it. " I have some infirmities 
upon me," he owned twice over' in his speech at the opening of 
Parliament; and his feverish irritability was quickened by the 
public danger. No supplies had been voted, and the pay of the 
army was heavily in arrear, while its temper grew more and more 
sullen at the appearance of the new Constitution and the reawak- 
ening of the Royalist intrigues. The continuance of the Parlia- 
mentary strife threw Cromwell at last, says an observer at his 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



579 



Court, " into a rage and passion like unto madness." Summoning 
liis coacli, by a sudden impulse, the Protector drove with a few 
o-nai-ds to Westminster ; and, setting aside the remonstrances of 
Fleetwood, summoned the two Houses to his presence. " I do dis- 
solve this Parliament," he ended a speech of angry rebuke, " and 
let God be judge betAveen you and me." Fatal as was the error, 
for the moment all went well. The army was reconciled by the 
blow leveled at its opponents, and the fcAv murmurers were weeded 
from its ranks by a careful remodeling. The triumphant officers 
vowed to stand or fall with his Highness. The danger of a Roy- 
alist rising vanished before a host of addresses from the counties. 
Great news, too, came from abroad, where victory in Flanders and 
the cession of Dunkirk set the seal on Cromwell's glory. But 
the fever crept steadily on, and his looks told the tale of death to 
the Quaker, Fox, who met him riding in Hampton Court Park. 
" Before I came to him," he says, " as he rode at the head of his 
Life Guards, I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him, 
and when I came to him he looked like a dead man." In the 
midst of his triumph Cromwell's heart was in fact heavy with the 
sense of failure. He had no desire to play the tyrant; nor had he 
any belief in the permanence of a mere tyranny. He had hardly 
dissolved the Parliament before he was planning the summons of 
another, and angry at the opposition which his Council offered to 
the project. " I will take my own resolutions," he said, gloomily, 
to his household ; " I can no longer satisfy myself to sit still, and 
make myself guilty of the loss of all the honest pai'ty and of the 
nation itself" But before this plan could be realized the over- 
taxed strength of the Protector suddenly gave way. He saw too 
clearly the chaos into which his death would plunge England to 
be willing to die. " Do not think I shall die," he burst out with 
feverish energy to the physicians who gathered around him ; 
" say not I have lost my reason ! I tell you the truth. I know it 
from better authority than any you can have from Galen or Hip- 
pocrates. It is the answer of God himself to our prayers !" Prayer 
indeed rose from every side for his recovery, but death drew stead- 
ily nearer, till even Cromwell felt that his hour was come. " I 
would be willing to live," the dying man murmured, " to be further 
serviceable to God and his people, but my work is done ! Yet God 
will be with his people !" A storm which tore roofs from houses 
and leveled huge trees in every forest seemed a fitting prelude to 
the passing away of his mighty spirit. Three days later, on the 
third of September, the day which had witnessed his victories of 
"Worcester and Dunbar, Cromwell quietly breathed his last. 

So absolute even in death was his sway over the minds of men 
that, to the wonder of the excited Royalists, even a doubtful nom- 
ination on his death-bed was enough to secure the peaceful suc- 
cession of his son, Richard Cromwell. Many, in fact, who had 
rejected the authority of his father, submitted peaceably to the 
new Protector. Their motives were explained by Baxtei', the 
most eminent among the Presbyterian ministers, in the address to 
Richard which announced his adhesion. "I observed," he says,, 



580 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



"that the nation generally rejoice in your peaceable entrance upon 
the government. Many are persuaded that you have been 
strangely kept from participating in any of our late bloody con- 
tentions, that God might make you the healer of our breaches, and 
employ you in that Temple work which David himself might not 
be honored with, though it was in his mind, because he shed 
blood abundantly and made great wars." The new Protector was 
a weak and worthless man, but the bulk of the nation were con- 
tent to be ruled by one Avho was at any rate no soldier, no Puri- 
tan, and no innovator. Richard was known to be lax and godless 
in his conduct, and he was believed to be conservative and even 
Royalist in heart. The tide of reaction was felt even in his 
Council. Their first act was to throw aside one of the greatest 
of Cromwell's reforms, and to fall back in the summons which 
they issued for the new Parliament on the old system of election. 
It was felt far more keenly in the tone of the new House of 
Commons. The Republicans under Vane, backed adroitly by 
the Royalists, fell hotly on Cromwell's system. The fiercest at- 
tack of all came from Sir Ashley Cooper, a Dorsetshire gentle- 
man, who had changed sides in the civil war, had fought for the 
King and then for the Parliament, had been a member of Crom- 
well's Council, and had of late ceased to be a member of it. His 
virulent invective on " His Highness of deplorable memory, who 
with fraud and force deprived you of your liberty when living and 
entailed slavery on you at his death," was followed by an equally 
virulent invective against the army. "They have not only sub- 
dued their enemies," said Cooper, " but the masters who raised 
and maintained them ! They have not only conquered Scotlanji 
and Ireland, but rebellious England too ; and there suppressed a 
Malignant party of magistrates and laws." The army was quick 
with its reply. The Council of its ofBcers demanded the appoint- 
ment of a soldier as their General in the place of the new Protect- 
or, who had assumed the command. The Commons at once or- 
dered the dismissal of all ofiicers who refused to engage " not to 
disturb or interrupt the free meetings of Parliament;" and Rich- 
ard ordered the Council of Officers to dissolve. Their reply was 
a demand for the dissolution of the Parliament, a demand with 
which Richard was forced to comply. The great work of the 
army, however, was still to secure a settled government ; and set- 
ting aside the new Protector, whose weakness was now evident, 
they resolved to fall back on the Parliament they had expelled 
from St. Stephen's, but which remained the one body that could 
put forward a legitimate claim to power. Of the one hundred and 
sixty members who had continued to sit after the King's death, 
about ninety returned to their seats, and resumed the administra- 
tion of affairs. But the memory of the Expulsion made any trust 
in or reconciliation with the army impossible. In spite of Vane's 
counsels, a reform of the officers was at once proposed, and though 
a Royalist rising in Cheshire under Sir George Booth threw the 
disputants for a moment together, the struggle revived as the 
danger passed away. A new boj)e indeed filled men's minds. 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



581 



Not only was the nation sick of military rule, but the army, un- 
conquerable so long as it held together, at last showed signs of 
division ; and Haslerig was encouraged by the temper of the 
troops in Scotland and Ireland to demand the dismissal of Fleet- 
wood and Lambert from their commands. They answered by driv- 
ing the Parliament again from Westminster, and by marching to 
meet the army under Monk, which was threatening to advance 
from Scotland to the south. Negotiation gave Monk time to 
gather a Convention at Edinburgh, and to strengthen himself 
with money and recruits. Then he advanced rapidly to Cold- 
stream, and the cry of " a free Parliament " ran like fire through 
the country. Not only Fairfax, who appeared in arms in York- 
shire, but the ships on the Thames, and the mob which thronged 
the streets of London, caught up the cry ; the army, thrown into 
confusion by its own divisions, strove to check the tide of feeling 
by recalling the Commons; and Monk, who lavished protestations 
of loyalty to that assembly, while he accepted petitions for a 
" free Parliament," entered London unopposed. From the mo- 
ment of his entry the restoration of the Stuarts became inevitable. 
The army, resolute as it still remained for the maintenance of " the 
Cause," was deceived by Monk's declarations of loyalty to it, and 
rendered powerless by an adroit dispersion of the troops over the 
country. At the instigation of Ashley Cooper, those who remained 
of the members who had been excluded from the House of Com- 
mons by Pride's Purge again forced their way into Parliament, 
and at once resolved on a dissolution and the election of a new 
House of Commons. The new House, which bears the name of 
the Convention, had hardly taken the solemn League and Cove- 
nant which showed its Presbyterian temper, and its leaders had 
only begun to draw up terms on which a Royal restoration might 
be assented to, when they found that Monk had betrayed them, 
and was already in negotiation with the exiled Court. All exac- 
tion of terms was now impossible ; the Declaration of Breda, in 
which Charles promised a general pardon, religious toleration, and 
satisfaction to the army, Avas received with a burst of national 
enthusiasm; and the old Constitution was restored by a solemn 
vote of the Convention, " that according to the ancient and funda- 
mental laws of this kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, 
by King, Lords, and Commons." The vote was hardly passed 
when Charles landed at Dover, and made his way amid the shouts 
of a great multitude to Whitehall. " It is my own fault," laughed 
the new King, with characteristic irony, " that I had not come 
back sooner; for I find nobody who does not tell me he has al- 
ways longed for my return." 

Puritanism, so men believed, had fallen never to rise again. As 
a political experiment it had ended in utter failure and disgust; 
as a religious system of national life it brought about the wildest 
outbreak of moral revolt that England has ever witnessed. And 
yet Puritanism was far from being dead ; it drew, indeed, a nobler 
life from its very fall. Nothing aids us better to trace the real 
course of Puritan influence since the fall of Puritanism than the 



5S2 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



thought of the two great works which have handed down from 
one generation to another its highest and noblest spirit. From 
that time to this the most popular of all religious books has been 
the Puritan allegory of the " Pilgrim's Progress." The most pop- 
ular of all English poems has been the Puritan ejjic of the " Par- 
adise Lost." Milton had been engaged during the civil war in 
strife with Presbj^terians and with Royalists, pleading for civil and 
religious freedom, for freedom of social life, and freedom of the 
press. At a later time he became Latin Secretary to the Protect- 
or, in spite of a blindness which had ''o'4en brought on by the in- 
tensity of his study. The Restoration found him of all living men 
the most hateful to the Royalists; for it was his "Defense of the 
English People "which had justified throughout Europe the execu- 
tion of the King. Parliament ordered his book to be burned by the 
common hangman; he was for a time imprisoned, and even when 
released he had to live amid threats of assassination from fanat- 
ical Cavaliers. To the ruin of his cause were added personal mis- 
fortunes in the bankruptcy of the scrivener who held the bulk of 
his property, and in the fire of London, which deprived him of 
mucli of what was left. As age drew on, he found himself reduced 
to comparative jDOverty, and driven to sell his library for subsist- 
ence. Even among the sectaries who shared his political opinions 
Milton stood in religious opinion alone, for he had gradually sev- 
ered himself from every accepted form of faith, had embraced Ari- 
anism, and had ceased to attend at any place of worship. ISTor was 
his home a happy one. The grace and geniality of his youth dis- 
appeared in the drudgery of a schoolmaster's life and among the 
invectives of controversy. In age his temper became stern and 
exacting. His daughters, who were forced to read to their blincl 
father in languages which they could not understand, revolted 
utterly against their bondage. But solitude and misfortune only 
brought out into bolder relief Milton's inner greatness. There was 
a grand simplicity in the life of his later years. He listened every 
morning to a chapter of the Hebrew Bible, and after musing in 
silence for a while pursued his studies till midday. Then he took 
exercise for an hour, played for another hour on the organ or viol, 
and renewed his studies. The evening was spent in converse with 
visitors and friends ; for, lonely and unpopular as Milton was, 
thei'e Avas one thing about him which made his house in Bunhill 
Fields a place of pilgrimage to the wits of the Restoration. He 
was the last of the Elizabethans. He had possibly seen Shakspere, 
as on his visits to London after his retirement to Stratford the play- 
Avright passed along Bread Street to his Avit combats at the Mer- 
maid. He had been the contemporary of Webster and Massin- 
ger, of Herrick and Crashaw. His " Comus " and " Arcades " had 
rivaled the masques of Ben Jonson, It was with a reverence drawn 
from thoughts like these that Dryden looked on the blind poet as 
he sat, clad in black, in his chamber hung with rusty green tap- 
estry, his fair brown hair falling as of old over a calm, serene face 
that still retained much of its youthful beauty, his cheeks deli- 
cately colored, his clear gray eyes showing no trace of their blind- 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



583 



ness. But famous, whether for good or ill, as his prose writings 
had made him, during fifteen years only a few sonnets had broken 
his silence as a singer. It was now, in his blindness and old age, 
with the cause he loved trodden under foot by men as vile as the 
rabble in " Comus," that the genius of Milton took refuge in the 
great poem on which through years of silence his imagination had 
still been brooding. 

On his return from his travels in Italy, Milton spoke of himself 
as musing on " a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or 
the vapors of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of 
some vulgar amourist or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite; 
nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her 
Siren daughters ; but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who 
can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his 
Seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify 
the lips of whom He pleases." His lips were touched at last. 
Seven years after the Restoration appeared the " Paradise Lost," 
and four years later the "Paradise Regained" and " Samson Ago- 
nistes," in the severe grandeur of whose verse we see the poet him- 
self " fallen," like Samson, " on evil days and evil tongues, with 
darkness and with danger compassed round." But great as the 
two last Avorks Avere, their greatness was eclipsed by that of their 
predecessor. The whole genius of Milton expressed itself in the 
"Paradise Lost." The romance, the gorgeous fancy, the daring 
imagination which he shared with the Elizabethan poets, the large 
but ordered beauty of form which he had drunk in from the liter- 
ature of Greece and Rome, the sublimity of conception, the lofti- 
ness of phrase which he owed to the Bible, blended in this story 
" of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree 
whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe." 
It is only when we review the strangely mingled elements Avhich 
make up the poem that we realize the genius which fused them 
into such a perfect whole. The meagre outline of the Hebrew 
legend is lost in the splendor and music of* Milton's verse. The 
stern idealism of Geneva is clothed in the gorgeous robes of the 
Renascence. If we miss something of the free play of Spenser's 
fancy, and yet more of the imaginative delight in their own crea- 
tions which gives so exquisite a life to the f)oetry of the early 
dramatists, we find in place of these the noblest example which 
our literature affords of the ordered majesty of classic form. But 
it is not with the literary value of the " Paradise Lost " that we 
are here concerned. Its historic importance lies in this, that it is 
the Epic of Puritanism. Its scheme is the problem with which the 
Puritan wrestled in hours of gloom and darkness, the pix)blem of 
sin and redemption, of the Avorld-wide struggle of evil against 
good. The intense moral concentration of the Puritan had given 
an almost bodily shape to spiritual abstractions before Milton gave 
life and being to the forms of Sin and Death. It was the Puritan 
tendency to mass into one vast "body of sin" the various forms 
of human evil, and by the very force of a passionate hatred to 
exaggerate their magnitude and their power, to which we owe the 



584 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



conception of Milton's Satan. The greatness of the Puritan aim 
in the long and wavering struggle for justice and law and a 
higher good ; the grandeur of character which the contest devel- 
oped ; the colossal forms of good and evil which moved over its 
stage ; the debates and conspiracies and battles which had been 
men's life for twenty years ; the mighty eloquence and mightier 
ambition which the war had roused into being — all left their mark 
on the " Paradise Lost," Whatever was highest and best in the 
Puritan temper spoke in the nobleness and elevation of the poem — 
in its purity of tone, in its grandeur of conception, in its ordered 
and equable realization of a great purpose. Even in his boldest 
flights, Milton is calm and master of himself. His touch is always 
sure. Whether he passes from Heaven to Hell, or from the coun- 
cil-hall of Satan to the sweet conference of Adam and Eve, his 
tread is steady and unfaltering. But if the poem expresses the 
higher qualities of the Puritan temper, it expresses no less exactly 
its defects. Throughout it we feel almost painfully a want of the 
finer and subtler sympathies, of a large and genial humanity, of a 
sense of spiritual mystery. Dealing as Milton does with subjects 
the most awful and mysterious that jDoet ever chose, he is never 
troubled by the obstinate questionings of invisible things which 
haunted the imagination of Shakspere. We look in vaiu for any 
^schylean background of the vast unknown. "Man's disobe- 
dience" and the scheme for man's redemption are laid down as 
clearly and with just as little mystery as in a Puritan discourse. 
On topics such as these, even God the Father (to borrow Pope's 
sneer) " turns a school divine." As in his earlier poems he had 
ordered and arranged nature, so in the "Paradise Lost" Milton 
orders and arranges Heaven and Hell. His mightiest figures,' 
Angel or Archangel, Satan or Belial, stand out colossal but dis- 
tinct. There is just as little of the wide sympathy with all that is 
human which is so lovable in Chaucer and Shakspere. On the 
contrary, the Puritan individuality is nowhere so overpowering as 
in Milton. He leaves the staraj) of himself deeply graven on all 
he creates. We hear his voice in every line of his poem. The 
cold, severe conception of moral virtue which reigns throughout 
it, the intellectual way in which he paints and regards beauty (for 
the beauty of Eve is a beauty which no mortal man may love), are 
Milton's own. We feel his inmost temper in the stoical self-repres- 
sion which gives its dignity to his figures. Adam utters no cry of 
agony when he is driven from Paradise. Satan sufiers in a defiant 
silence. It is to this intense self-concentration that we must at- 
tribute the strange deficiency of humor which Milton shared with 
the Puritans generally, and which here'and there breaks the sub- 
limity of his poem with strange slips into the grotesque. But it 
is above all to this Puritan deficiency in human sympathy that we 
must attribute his wonderful want of dramatic genius. Of the 
power which creates a thousand diflferent characters, whicli endows 
each with its appropriate act and word, which loses itself in its 
own creations, no great poet ever had less. 

The poem of Milton was the epic of a fallen cause. The broken 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



585 



hope, which had seen the Kingdom of the Saints pass like a dream 
away, spoke in its very name. Paradise was lost once more when 
the New Model, which embodied the courage and the hope of Pu- 
ritanism, laid down its arms. In his progress to the capital Charles 
passed in review the soldiers assembled on Blackheath. Betrayed 
by their general, abandoned by their leaders, surrounded as they 
were by a nation in arms, the gloomy silence of their ranks awed 
even the careless King with a sense of danger. But none of the 
victories of the New Model were so glorious as the victory which 
it won over itself. Quietly and without a struggle, as men who 
bowed to the inscrutable will of God, the fai-mers and traders w^ho 
had dashed Rupert's chivalry to pieces on Naseby field, who had 
scattered at Worcester the "army of the aliens," and driven into 
helpless flight the sovereign that now came "to enjoy his own 
again," who had renewed beyond sea the glories of Cressy and 
Agincourt, had mastered the Parliament, had brought a king to 
justice and the block, had given laws to England, and held even 
Cromwell in awe, became farmers and traders again, and were 
known among tlieir fellow-men by no other sign than their great- 
er soberness and industry. And with them Puritanism laid down 
the sword. It ceased from the long attempt to build up a king- 
dom of God by force and violence, and fell back on its truer work 
of building up a kingdom of righteousness in the hearts and con- 
sciences of men. It was from the moment of its seeming fall that 
its real victory began. As soon as the wild orgy of the Restora- 
tion was over, men began to see that nothing that was really wor- 
thy in the work of Puritanism had been undone. The revels of 
Whitehall, the skepticism and debauchery of courtiers, the corrup- 
tion of statesmen, left the mass of Englishmen what Puritanism 
had made them — serious, earnest, sober in life and conduct, firm in 
their love of Protestantism and of freedom. In the Revolution of 
1688 Puritanism did the work of civil liberty which it had failed 
to do in that of 1642. It wrought out through Wesley and the re- 
vival of the eighteenth century the work of religious reform which 
its earlier efforts had only ttirown back for a hundred years. Slow- 
ly but steadily it introduced its own seriousness and purity into 
English society, English literature, English politics. The whole 
history of English progiiesis since the Restoration, on its moral and 
spiritual sides, has beejj the^history of Puritanism. 



586 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE BEVOLUTIOK 
Section E.— England and tlie Revoluttion. 

{^Authorities. — For the social change, see the Memoirs of Pepys and Evelyn, the 
dramatic works of Wycherley and Etherege, and Lord Macaulay's "Essay on the 
Dramatists of the Restoration." The fullest account of Lord Bacon will ho, found 
in his " Life and Letters," now being published with his "Works," by Mr. Sped- 
ding, whose apologetic tones may be contrasted with the verdict of Lord Macaulay 
("Essay on Lord Bacon") and with the more judicious judgment of Mr. Gardner 
("History of England " and " The Spanish Marriage "). The fairest estimate of 
his position in the history of Science will be found in Mr. Lewes's " History of Phi- 
losophy." For the earlier history of English Science, see Hallam's sketch (" Litei"- 
ary History," vol. iv.) ; the histories of the Royal Society by Thompson or Wade ; 
and Sir D. Brewster's biography of Newton. Sir W. Molesworth has edited the 
works of Hobbes.] 

No event ever marked a deeper or a more lasting change in the 
temper of the English people than the entry of Charles the Sec- 
ond into Whitehall. With it modern England begins. Influences 
which had up to this time moulded our liistory — the theological 
influence of the Reformation, the monarchical influence of the new 
kingship, the feudal influence of the Middle Ages, the yet earlier 
influence of tradition and custom — suddenly lost power over the 
minds of men. We find ourselves aJl at once among the great 
currents of thought and activity which have gone on widening 
and deepening from that time to this. The England around us is 
our own England, an England whose chief forces are industry and 
science, the love of popular freedom and of law, an England which 
presses steadily forward to a larger social justice and equality, 
and which tends more and more to bring every custom and tradi- 
tion — religious, intellectual, and political — to the test of pure rea- 
son. Between modern thought, on some at least of its more im- 
portant sides, and the thought of men before the Restoration, there 
is a great gulf fixed. A political thinker in the present day would 
find it equally hard to discuss any point of statesmanship with 
Lord Burleigh or with Oliver Cromwell. He would find no point 
of contact between their ideas of national life or national welfare, 
their conception of government or the ends of government, their 
mode of regarding economical and social questions, and his own. 
But no gulf of this sort parts us from the men who followed the 
Restoration. From that time to this, whatever difierences there 
may have been as to practical conclusions drawn from them, there 
has been a substantial agreement as to the grounds of our polit- 
ical, our social, our intellectual and religious life. Paley would 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



587 



have found no difficulty in understanding Tillotson ; Newton and 
Sir Humphrey Davy could have talked without a sense of sever- 
ance. There would have been nothing to hinder a perfectly clear 
discussion on government or law between John Locke and Jeremy 
Bentham. 

The change from the old England to the new is so startling 
that we are apt to look on it as a more sudden change than it 
really was, and the outer aspect of the Restoration does much to 
strengthen this impression of suddenness. The aim of the Puritan 
had been to set up a visible kingdom of God upon earth. He had 
wrought out his aim by reversing the policy of the Stuarts and 
the Tudors. From the time of Henry the Eighth to the time of 
Charles the First, the Church had been looked upon primarily as 
an instrument for securing, by moral and religious iniluences, the 
social and political ends of the State. Under the Commonwealth, 
the State, in its turn, was regarded primarily as an instrument for 
securing through its political and social influences the moral and 
religious ends of the Church. In the Puritan theory, Englishmen 
were " the Lord's people ;" a people dedicated to him by a sol- 
emn Covenant, and whose end as a nation was to carry out his 
will. For such an end it was needful that rulers as well as j)eople 
should be " godly men." Godliness became necessarily the chief 
qualification for public employment. The new modeling of the 
army filled its ranks with " saints." Parliament resolved to em- 
ploy no man " but such as the House shall be satisfied of his real 
godliness." The Covenant which bound the nation to God bound 
it to enforce God's laws even more earnestly than its own. The 
Bible lay on the table of the House of Commons ; and its prohibi- 
tion of swearing, of drunkenness, of fornication became j^art of the 
law of the land. Adultery was made felony without the benefit 
of clergy. Pictures whose subjects jarred with the new decorum 
were ordered to be burned, and statues were chipped ruthlessly 
into decency. It was in the same temper that Puritanism turned 
from public life to private. The Covenant bound not the whole 
nation only, but every individual member of the nation, " to a jeal- 
ous God," a God jealous of any superstition that robbed him of the 
worship which was exclusively his due, jealous of the distraction 
and frivolity which robbed him of the entire devotion of man to 
his service. The want of poetry, of fancy, in the common Puritan 
temper, condemned half the popular observances of England as 
superstitions. It was superstitious to keep Christmas, or to deck 
the house with holly and ivy. It was superstitious to dance around 
the village May-pole. It was flat Popery to eat a mince-pie. The 
rough sport, the mirth and fun of "merry England," were out of 
place in an England called with so great a calling. Bull-baiting, 
bear-baiting, horse-racing, cock-fighting, the village revel, the dance 
on the village green, were put down with the same indiscriminat- 
ing severity. The long struggle between the Puritans and the 
playwrights ended in the closing of every theatre. 

The Restoration brought Charles to Whitehall; and in an instant 
the whole face of England was changed. All that was noblest 



588 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



and best in Puritanism was whirled away with its pettiness and 
its tyranny in the current of the nation's hate. Religion had been 
turned into a political and a social tyranny, and it fell with their 
fall. Godliness became a by-word of scoi-n ; sobriety in dress, in 
speech, in manners was flouted as a mark of the detested Puritan- 
ism. Butler, in his " Hudibras," poured insult on the past with a 
pedantic buffoonery for which the general hatred, far more than 
its humor, secured a hearing. Archbishop Sheldon listened to the 
mock sermon of a Cavalier who held up the Puritan phrase and 
the Puritan twang to ridicule in his hall at Lambeth. Dueling 
and raking became the marks of a fine gentleman ; and grave di- 
vines winked at the follies of " honest fellows," who fought, gam- 
bled, swore, drank, and ended a day of debauchery by a night in 
the gutter. The life of a man of fashion vibrated between frivol- 
ity and excess. One of the comedies of the time tells the court- 
ier that " he must dress well, dance well, fence well, have a talent 
for love-letters, an agreeable voice, be amorous and discreet — 
but not too constant." But to graces such as these the rakes of 
the Restoration added a shamelessness and a brutality which 
passes belief. Lord Rochester was a fashionable poet, and the 
titles of some of his poems are such as no pen of our day could 
copy. Sir Charles Sedley was a fashionable wit, and the foulness 
of his words made even the porters of Covent Garden pelt him 
from the balcony when he ventured to address them. The truest 
type of the time is the Duke of Buckingham, and the most char- 
acteristic event in the Duke's life Avas a duel in whicli he consum- 
mated his seduction of Lady Shrewsbury by killing her husband, 
while the Countess in disguise as a page held his horse for him' 
and looked on at the murder. Vicious as the stage Avas, it only 
reflected the general vice of the time. The Comedy of the Resto- 
ration borrowed every thing from the Comedy of France save the 
poetry, the delicacy, and good taste which veiled its grossness. 
Seduction, intrigue, brutality, cynicism, debauchery, found fitting 
expression in dialogue of a studied and deliberate foulness, which 
even its wit fails to redeem from disgust. Wycherley, the first 
dramatist of the time, remains the most brutal among all writers 
for the stage ; and nothing gives so damning an impression of his 
day as the fact that he found actors to repeat his words and audi- 
ences to applaud them. In men such as Wycherley Milton found 
types for the Belial of his great poem, " than whom a spirit more 
lewd fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love vice for itself." 
He piques himself on the frankness and "plain dealing" which 
painted the world as he saw it, a world of brawls ;ind assignations, 
of orgies at Vauxhall and fights with the watch, of lies and double- 
entendres, of knaves and dupes, of men who sold their daughters 
and women who cheated their husbands. But the cynicism of 
Wycherley was no greater than that of the men about him ; and 
in mere love of what was vile, in contempt of virtue and disbelief 
in purity or honesty, the King himself stood ahead of any of his 
subjects. 

It is easy, however, to exaggerate the extent of this reaction. 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



589 



So far as we can judge from the memoirs of the time, its more vio- 
lent forms were practically confined to the capital and the Court. 
The mass of Englishmen were satisfied with getting back their 
May-poles and mince-pies ; and a large part of the people remained 
Pui-itan in life and belief, though they threw aside many of the 
outer characteristics of Puritanism. ISTor was the revolution in 
feeling as sudden as it seemed. Even if the political strength of 
Puritanism had remained unbroken, its social influence must soon 
have ceased. The young Englishmen who grew up in the midst 
of civil war knew nothing of the bitter tyranny which gave its 
zeal and fire to the religion of their fathers. From the social and 
religious anarchy around them, from the endless controversies and 
discussions of the time, they drank in the spirit of skepticism, of 
doubt, of free inquiry. If religious enthusiasm had broken the spell 
of ecclesiastical tradition, its own extravagance broke the spell of 
religious enthusiasm; and the new generation turned in disgust 
to try forms of political government and spiritual belief by the 
cooler and less fallible test of reason. It is easy to see the rapid 
spread of such a tendency even in the families of the leading Pu- 
ritans. Neither of Cromwell's sons made any pretensions to re- 
ligion. Cromwell himself in his later years felt bitterly that Pu- 
ritanism had missed its aim. He saw the country gentleman, alien- 
ated from it by the despotism it had brought in its train, alienated 
perhaps even more by the appearance of a religious freedom for 
which he was unprepared, drifting into a love of the older Church 
that he had once opposed. He saw the growth of a dogged re- 
sistance in the people at large. The attempt to secure spiritual 
results by material force had failed, as it always fails. It broke 
down before the indifierence and resentment of the great mass of 
the people, of men who were neither lawless nor enthusiasts, but 
who clung to the older traditions of social order, and whose hu- 
mor and good sense revolted alike from the artificial conception 
of human life which Puritanism had formed, and from its efibrt to 
force such a conception on a people by law. It broke down, too, 
before the corruption of the Puritans themselves. It was impos- 
sible to distinguish between the saint and the hypocrite as soon 
as godliness became profitable. Ashley Cooper, a skeptic in re- 
ligion and a profligate in morals, was among "the loudest bagpipes 
of the squeaking train." Even among the really earnest Puritans 
prosperity disclosed a pride, a worldliness, a selfish hardness which 
had been hidden in the hour of persecution. The tone of Crom- 
well's later speeches shows his consciousness that the ground was 
slipping from under his feet. He no longer dwells on the dream 
of a Pui'itan England, of a nation rising as a whole into a people 
of God. He falls back on the phrases of his youth, and the saints 
become again a " peculiar people," a remnant, a fragment among 
the nation at large. But the influences which were really foiling 
Cromwell's aim, and forming beneath his eyes the new England 
from which he turned in despair, were influences Avhose power he 
can hardly have recognized. Even before tlie outburst of the 
Civil War a small group of theological Latitudinarians had gath- 



590 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ered around Lord Falkland at Great Tew. In the very year when 
the King's standard was set up at Nottingham, Hobbes publish- 
ed the first of his works on Government. The last Royalist had 
only just laid down his arms when the little company who were 
at a later time to be known as the Royal Society gathered around 
Wilkins at Oxford. It is in this group of scientific observers that 
we catch the secret of the coming genei'ation. From the spirit- 
ual problems with which it had so long wrestled in vain, England 
turned at last to the physical world around it, to the observation 
of its phenomena, to the discovery of the laws which govern them. 
The pursuit of Physical Science became a passion; and its meth- 
od of research, by observation, comparison, and experiment, trans- 
formed the older methods of inquiry'- in matters without its pale. 
In religion, in politics, in the study of man and of nature, not faith 
but reason, not tradition but inquiry, were to be the watchwords 
of the coming time. The dead-weight of the past was suddenly 
rolled away, and the new England heard at last and understood 
the call of Francis Bacon. 

If in our notice of the Elizabethan literature we omitted all 
mention of Lord Bacon, it is because the scientific influence of 
Bacon told not on the age of Elizabeth, but on the age of the Res- 
toration. "For ray name and memory," he said at the close of 
his life, "I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign 
nations, and the next age." It was to the "next age" too that, 
in spite of the general sense of his wisdom and ability, the scien- 
tific method of Bacon really made its first appeal. What belong- 
ed to his own time was the poorest and meanest part of him. 
Francis Bacon was born at the opening of Elizabeth's reign, three 
years before the birth of Shakspere. He was the younger son of 
a Lord Keeper, as well as the nej^hew of Lord Bnrleigh, and even 
in boyhood his quickness and sagacity won the favor of the Queen. 
Elizabeth " delighted much to confer with him, and to prove him 
with questions : unto which he delivered himself with that gravity 
and maturity above his years that her Majesty would often term 
him 'the young Lord Keeper.'" His earlier hopes of Court suc- 
cess, however, were soon dashed to the ground. He was left poor 
by his father's death ; the ill-will of the Cecils barred his advance- 
ment with the Queen ; and a few years before Shakspere's arrival 
in London he entered at Gray's Inn, and soon became one of the 
most successful lawyers of the time. At twenty-three he was a 
member of the House of Commons, and his judgment and elo- 
quence at once brought him to the front, " The fear of every man 
that heard him was lest he should make an end," Ben Jonson tells 
us. The steady growth of his reputation was quickened by the 
appearance of his "Essays," a work remarkable not merely for 
the condensation of its thought, and its felicity and exactness of 
expression, but for the power with which it applied to human life 
that experimental analysis which Bacon was at a later time to 
make the key of Science. His fiime at once became great at home 
and abroad, but with this nobler fame Bacon could not content 
himself. He was conscious of great powers, as well as great aims 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



691 



for the public good ; and it was a time when such aims could 
hardly be realized save through the means of the Crown. But 
political employment seemed farther off than ever. At the outset 
of his career in Parliament he had irritated Elizabeth by a free 
opposition to her demand of a subsidy ; and though the offense 
was atoned for by profuse apologies, and by the cessation of all 
further resistance to the policy of the Court, the law offices of the 
Crown were more than once refused to him, and it was only after 
the publication of his "Essays" that he could obtain some slight 
promotion as a Queen's Counsel. The moral weakness which at 
once disclosed itself is perhaps the best justification of the Queen 
in her reluctance — a reluctance so strangely in contrast with her 
ordinary course — to bring the wisest head in her realm to her 
Council-board. The men whom Elizabeth employed were for the 
most part men whose intellect was directed by a strong sense of 
public duty. Their reverence for the Queen, strangely exagger- 
ated as it may seem to us, was guided and controlled by an ar- 
dent patriotism and an earnest sense of religion; and with all 
their regard for the Royal prerogative, they never lost their re- 
gard for the law. The grandeur and originality of Bacon's intel- 
lect parted him from men like these quite as much as the blunt- 
ness of his moral perceptions. In politics, as in science, he had 
little reverence for the past. Law, constitutional privileges, or 
religion were to him simply means of bringing about certain ends 
of good government ; and if these ends could be brought about in 
a shorter fashion, he saw only pedantry in insisting on more cum- 
brous means. He had great social and political ideas to realize, 
the reform and codification of the law, the civilization of Ireland, 
the purification of the Church, the union — at a later time — of Scot- 
land and England, educational projects, projects of material im- 
provement, and the like; and the direct and shortest way of real- 
izing these ends was in Bacon's eyes the use of the power of the 
Crown. But whatever charm such a conception of the Royal 
j)ower might have for her successor, it seems to have had little 
charm for Elizabeth ; nor was her nature likely to be won by the 
servility with which Bacon strove to improve his new opportunity 
of advancement. Partly, perhaps, from rivalry with the Cecils, 
but certainly in great part from his appreciation of Bacon's power. 
Lord Essex had steadily backed his efforts after promotion ; and 
his disappointment in them had been alleviated by the Earl's gen- 
erous present of an estate worth (in our money) some twelve thou- 
sand pounds. Bacon showed a true friendship for Essex by dis- 
suading him from the career of oj^position which at last brought 
liim to the block ; but every tie of friendship and gratitude was 
forgotten when he appeared as Queen's Counsel to support the 
charge of treason at the Earl's trial. He aggravated and pressed 
home the charge with has whole energy and skill ; and accepted a 
large gift from the court for his later service iu publishing a gar- 
bled account of the "practices and treasons" of his friend. But 
Elizabeth still remained cold to his advances ; and it was not till 
the accession of James that the rays of Royal favor broke slowly 

38 



592 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



upon him. He became successively Solicitor and Attorney Gen- 
eral ; the year of Shakspere's death saw him called to the Privy 
Council; he verified Elizabeth's prediction by becoming Lord Keep- 
er. At last the goal of his ambition was reached. He had attach- 
ed himself to the rising fortunes of Buckingham, and the favor of 
Buckingham made him Lord Chancellor. He was raised to the 
peerage as Baron Verulam, and created, at a later time, Viscount 
St. Albans. But the nobler dreams for which these meaner honors 
had been sought escaped his grasp. His projects still remained 
projects, v/hile Bacon to retain his hold on office was stooping to 
a miserable compliance with the worst excesses of Buckingham 
and his Royal master. The years during which he held the Chan- 
cellorship were the most disgraceful years of a disgraceful reign. 
They saw the execution of Raleigh, the sacrifice of the Palatinate, 
the exaction of benevolences, the multiplication of monopolies, the 
supremacy of Buckingham. Against none of the acts of folly and 
wickedness which distinguished James's government did Bacon 
do more than protest ; in some of the worst, and above all in the 
attempt to coerce the judges into prostrating law at the King's 
feet, he took a personal part. But even his remonstrances were 
too much for the young favorite, who regarded him as the mere 
creature of his will. It was in vain that Bacon flung himself at 
the Duke's feet, and begged him to pardon a single instance of op- 
position to his caprice. A Parliament was impending, and Buck- 
ino'ham resolved to avert from himself the storm which was gath- 
ering by sacrificing to it his meaner dependents. To ordinary 
eyes the Chancellor was at the summit of human success. Jouson 
had just sung of him as one " whose even thread the Fates spin 
round and full out of their choicest and their whitest wool," when 
the storm burst. The great Parliament of 1620 met after a silence 
of six disgraceful years, and one of its first acts was to charge Bacon 
with corruption in the exercise of his office. He at once pleaded 
guilty to the charge. " I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I 
am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defense." " I beseech 
your Lordships," he added, " to be merciful to a broken reed." 
The heavy fine imposed on him was remitted by the Crown; but 
the Great Seal was taken from him, and he was declared incapable 
of holding office in the Slate or of sitting in Parliament. 

Bacon's fall restored him to that position of real greatness from 
which his ambition had so long torn him away. "My conceit of 
his person," said Ben Jonson, "was never increased toward him 
by his place or honors. But I have and do reverence him for his 
greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me 
ever by his work one of the greatest men, and most worthy of ad- 
miration, that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever 
prayed that God would give him strength ; for greatness he could 
not want." His intellectual activity was never more conspicuous 
than in the last four years of his life. He began a digest of the 
laws, and a "History of England under the Tudors," revised and 
expanded his " Essays," dictated a jest-book, and busied himself 
with experiments in physics. It was while studying the eflTect of 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



593 



cold in preventing animal putrefaction that he stopped his coach 
to stuff a fowl with snow, and caught the fever which ended in his 
death. The great work of his life remained a fragment to the last. 
Even as a boy at college he had expressed his dislike of the Aris- 
totelian philosophy, as'^"a philosophy only strong for disputations 
and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the 
benefit of the life of man," As a law-student of twenty-one he 
sketched in a tract on the " Greatest Birth of Time " the system 
of inductive inquiry he was already prepared to substitute for it. 
.At forty-four, after the final disappointment of his political hopes 
from Elizabeth, the publication of the " Advancement of Learn- 
ing " marked the first decisive appearance of the new philosophy. 
The close of this work was, in his own words, " a general and faith- 
ful perambulation of learning, with an inquiry what parts thereof 
lie fresh and waste, and not improved and converted by the indus- 
try of man; to the end that such a plot, made and recorded to 
memorj^, may both minister light to any public designation and 
also serve to excite voluntary endeavors." It was only by such a 
survey, he held, that men could be turned from useless studies, or 
ineffectual means of pursuing more useful ones, and directed to the 
true end of knowledge as "a rich storehouse for the glory of the 
Creator and the relief of man's estate." Two years later appeared 
his "Cogitata etVisa," a first sketch of the "IST^vum Organum," 
which in its complete form was presented to James immediately 
before Bacon's fall. The year after his fall he produced his " Nat- 
ural and Experimental History." This, with the " IsTovum Orga- 
num" and the "Advancement of Learning," was all of his project- 
ed "Listauratio Magna" which he was destined to complete — and 
even of this portion we have only part of the last two divisions. 
The " Ladder of the Understanding," which was to have followed 
these, and led up from experience to science, the "Anticipations," 
or provisional hypotheses for the inquiries of the new philosophy, 
and the closing account of " Science in Practice," were left for 
posterity to bring to completion. " We may, as we trust," said 
Bacon, " make no despicable beginnings. The destinies of the 
human race must complete it, in such a manner perhaps as men 
looking only at the present world M'ould not readily conceive. 
For upon this will depend, not only a speculative good, but all the 
fortunes of mankind, and all their power." When we turn from 
words like these to the actual work which Bacon did, it is hard 
not to feel a certain disappointment. He did not thoroughly un- 
derstand the older philosophy which he attacked. His revolt from 
the Avaste of human intelligence Avhich he conceived to be owing 
to the adoption of a false method of investigation blinded him to 
the real value of deduction as an instrument of discovery; and he 
was encouraged in his contempt for it as much by his own igno- 
rance of mathematics as by the non-existence in his day of the 
great deductive sciences of physics and astronomy. Nor had he 
a more accurate prevision of the method of modern science. The 
inductive process to which he exclusively directed men's attention 
bore no fruit in Bacon's hands. The " art of investigating nature," 



594 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



on which he prided himself, has proved useless for scientific pur- 
poses, and would be rejected by modern investigators. Where 
he M^as on a more correct ti-ack he can hardly be regarded as orig- 
inal. " It may be doubted," says Dugald Stewart, " whether any 
one important rule with regard to the true method of investiga- 
tion be contained in his works of which no hint can be traced in 
those of his predecessors." Not only, indeed, did Bacon fail to 
anticipate the methods of modern science, but he even rejected 
the great scientific discoveries of his own day. He set aside with 
the same scorn the astronomical theory of Copernicus and the- 
magnetic investigations of Gilbert, and the contempt seems to 
have been fully returned. "The Lord Chancellor wrote on sci- 
ence," said Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, 
" like a Lord Cliancellor." 

In spite, however, of his inadequate appreciation either of the 
old philosophy or the new, the almost unanimous voice of later 
ages has attributed, and justly attributed, to the "Novum Orga- 
num" a decisive influence on the development of modern science. 
If he failed in revealing the method of experimental research, 
Bacon was the first to proclaim the existence of a Philosophy of 
Science, to insist on the unity of knowledge and inquiry through- 
out the physical world, to give dignity by the large and noble 
temper in which he treated them to the petty details of experi- 
ment in which science had to begin, to clear a way for it by set- 
ting scornfully aside the traditions of the past, to claim for it its 
true rank and value, and to point to the enormous results which 
its culture would bring in increasing the power and happiness of 
mankind. In one respect his attitude was in the highest degree 
significant. The age in which he lived was one in which theology 
was absorbing the intellectual energy of the world. He Avas the 
servant, too, of a king with whom theological studies superseded 
all others. But if he bowed in all else to James, Bacon would not, 
like Casaubon, bow in this. He would not even, like Descartes, 
attempt to transform theology by turning reason into a mode of 
theological demonstration. He stood absolutely aloof from it. 
Though as a politician he did not shrink from dealing with such 
subjects as Church Reform, he dealt with them simply as matters 
of civil polity. But from his exhaustive enumeration of the branch- 
es of human knowledge he excluded theology, and theology alone. 
His method was of itself inapplicable to a subject, where the 
premises were assumed to be certain and the results known. 
His aim was to seek for unknown results by simple experiment. 
It was against received authority and accepted tradition in mat- 
ters of inquiry that his whole system protested ; what he urged 
was the need of making belief rest strictly on proof, and proof 
rest on the conclusions drawn from evidence by reason. But in 
theology — all theologians asserted — reason played but a subordi- 
nate part. "If I proceed to treat of it," said Bacon, "I shall step 
out of the bark of human reason, and enter into the ship of the 
Church. Neither will the stars of philosophy, which have hitherto 
so nobly shone on us, any longer give us their light," The cer- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



595 



tainty, indeed, of conclusions on such subjects was out of harmony 
with the grandest feature of Bacon's work, his noble confession 
of the liability of every inquirer to error. It was his especial task 
to warn men against the " vain shows " of knowledge which had 
so long hindered any real advance in it, the " idols " of the Tribe, 
the Den, the Forum, and the Theatre ; the errors which spring from 
the systematizing spirit which pervades all masses of men, or from 
individual idiosyncrasies, or from the strange power of words and 
phrases over the mind, or from the traditions of the past. Nor 
were the claims of theology easily to be reconciled with the posi- 
tion which he was resolute to assign to natural science. " Through 
all those ages," Bacon says, " wherein men of genius or learning 
principally or even moderately flourished, the smallest part of hu- 
man industry has been spent on natural philosophy, though this 
ought to be esteemed as the great mother of the sciences; for all 
the rest, if torn from this root, may perhaps be polished and formed 
for use, but can receive little increase." It was by the adoption 
of the method of inductive inquiry which physical science was to 
make its own, and by basing inquiry on the ground which physical 
science could supply, that the moral sciences, ethics and politics, 
could alone make any real advance. "Let none expect any great 
promotion of the sciences, especially in their effective part, unless 
natural philosophy be drawn out to particular sciences; and, again, 
unless these particular sciences be brought back again to natural 
philosophy. From this defect it is that astronomy, optics, music, 
many mechanical arts, and (what seems stranger) even moral and 
civil philosophy and logic, rise but little above the foundations, 
and only skim over the varieties and surfaces of things." 

It Avas this lofty conception of the position and destiny of nat- 
ural science which Bacon was the first to impress upon mankind 
at large. The age was one in which knowledge, as we have seen, 
was passing to fields of inquiry which had till then been unknown, 
in which Kepler and Galileo were creating modern astronomy, in 
which Descartes was revealing the laws of motion, and Harvey 
the circulation of the blood. But to the mass of men this great 
change was all but imperceptible ; and it was the energy, the pro- 
found conviction, the eloquence of Bacon which first called the 
attention of manlcind as a whole to the power and impoi'tance of 
physical research. It was he who by his lofty faith in the results 
and victories of the new philosophy nerved its followers to a zeal 
and confidence equal to his own. It was he who above all gave 
dignity to the slow and patient processes of investigation, of ex- 
periment, of comparison, to the sacrificing of hypothesis to fact, to 
the single aim after truth, which was to be the law of modern sci- 
ence. But, in England at least, Bacon stood — as we have said — 
before his age. The beginnings of physical science Avere more 
slow and timid there than in any country of Europe. Only two 
discoveries of any real value came from English research before 
the Restoration; the first, Gilbert's discovery of terrestrial mag- 
netism in the close of Elizabeth's reign ; the next, the great dis- 
covery of the circulation of the blood, which was taught by Har- 



596 



HISTORY OF. THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



vey in the reign of James. But, apart from these illustrious names, 
England took little share in the scientific movement of the conti- 
nent ; and her whole energies seemed to be whirled into the vor- 
tex of theology and politics by the Civil War, But the war had 
not reached its end when a little group of students were to be seen 
in London, men " inquisitive," says one of them, " into natural 
philosophy and other parts of human learning, and particularly of 
what hath been called the New Philosophy, . . . which, from the 
times of Galileo at Florence and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Veru- 
1am) in England, hath been much cultivated in Italy, France, Ger- 
many, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in England." 
The strife of the time, indeed, aided in directing the minds of men 
to natural inquiries. "To have been always tossing about some 
theological question," says the first historian of the Royal Society, 
Bishop Sprat, " would have been to have made that their private 
diversion, the excess of which they disliked in the public. To have 
been eternally musing on civil business and the distresses of the 
country was too melancholy a reflection. It was nature alone 
which could pleasant'ly entertain them in that estate." Foremost 
in the group stood Doctors Wallis and Wilkins, whose removal to 
Oxford, which had just been reorganized by the Puritan Visitors, 
divided the little company into two societies. The Oxford socie- 
ty, which was the more important of the two, held its meetings at 
the lodgings of Dr. Wilkins, who had become Warden of Wadham 
College, and added to the names of its members that of the emi- 
nent mathematician. Dr. Ward, and that of the first of English econ- 
omists. Sir William Petty. " Our business," Wallis tells us, " was 
(precluding matters of theology and State afiairs) to discourse anfl 
consider of philosophical inquiries and such as related thereunto, 
as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Statics, 
Magnetics, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments : with 
the state of these studies, as then cultivated at home and abroad. 
We then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in 
the ve7ice lactew, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, 
the nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the 
oval shape of Saturn, the spots in the sun and its turning on its 
own axis, the inequalities and selenography of the moon, the sev- 
eral phases of Venus and Mercury, the improvement of telescopes, 
the grinding of glasses for that purpose, the weight of air, the pos- 
sibility or impossibility of vacuities, and nature's abhorrence there- 
of, the Torricellian experiment in quicksilver, the descent of heavy 
bodies and the degree of acceleration therein, and divers other 
things of like nature." 

The other little company of inquirers, who remained in London, 
was at last broken up by the troubles of the Second Protectorate ; 
but it was revived at the Restoration by the return to London of 
the more eminent members of the Oxford group. Science suddenly 
became the fashion of the day. Charles was himself a fair chem- 
ist, and took a keen interest in the problems of navigation. The 
Duke of Buckingham varied his freaks of rhyming, drinking, and 
fiddling by fits of devotion to his laboratory. Poets like Denham 



i::.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



597 



and Cowley, courtiers like Sir Robert Murray and Sir Kenelra Dig- 
by, joined the scientific company to which — in token of his sympa- 
thy with it — the King gave the title of" The Royal Society." The 
curious glass toys called Prince Rupert's drops recall the scientific 
inquiries which amused the old age of the great cavalry-leader of 
the Civil War. Wits and fops crowded to the meetings of the 
new Society. Statesmen like Lord Soraers felt honored at being 
chosen its presidents. Its definite establishment marks the open- 
ing of a great age of scientific discovery in England. Almost ev- 
ery year of the half-century which followed saw some step made 
to a wider and truer knowledge. Our first national observatory 
rose at Greenwich, and modern astronomy began Avith the long- 
series of astronomical obsex'vations which immortalized the name 
of Flamsteed. His successor, Halley, undertook the investigation 
of the tides, of comets, and of terrestrial magnetism. Hooke im- 
proved the microscope, and gave a fresh impulse to microscopical 
research. Boyle made the air-pump a means of advancing the sci- 
ence of pneumatics, and became the founder of experimental chem- 
istry. Wilkins pointed forward to the science of philology in his 
scheme of a universal language. Sj^denham introduced a careful 
observation of nature and facts which changed the whole face of 
medicine. The physiological researches of Willis first threw light 
upon the structure of the brain. Woodward was the founder of 
mineralogy. In his edition of Willoughby's " Ornithology," and 
in his own "History of Fishes," John Ray was the first to raise 
zoology to the rank of a science; and the first scientific classifica- 
tion of animals was attempted in his " Synopsis of Quadrupeds." 
Modern botany began Avith his " History of Plants," and the re- 
searches of an Oxford professor, Robert Morrison ; while Grow 
divided with Malpighi the credit of founding the study of vege- 
table physiology. But great as some of these names undoubtedly 
are, they are lost in the lustre of Isaac Newton. Newton was 
born at Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, on Christmas-day, in the 
memorable year which saw the outbreak of the Civil War. In 
the year of the Restoration he entered Cambridge, where the 
teaching of Isaac Barrow quickened his genius for mathematics, 
and where the method of Descartes had superseded the older 
modes of study. From the close of his Cambridge career his life 
became a series of great physical discoveries. At twenty-three he 
facilitated the calculation of planetary movements by his theory 
of Fluxions. The optical discoveries to which he was led by his 
experiments with the prism, and which he partly disclosed in the 
lectures which he delivered as Mathematical Professor at Cam- 
bridge, were embodied in the theory of light which he laid before 
the Roj^al Society on becoming a Fellow of it. His discovery of 
the law of gravitation had been made as early as 1666 ; but the 
eiToneous estimate which was then generally received of the earth's 
diameter prevented him from disclosing it for sixteen years; and 
it was not till the eve of the Revolution that the " Principia " re- 
vealed to the world his new theory of the Universe. 

It is impossible to do more than indicate, in such a summary 



598 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



as we have given, the wonderful activity of directly scientific 
thought which distinguished the age of the Restoration. But tlio 
skeptical and experimental temper of mind which this activity dis- 
closed told on every phase of the world around it. We see the 
attempt to bring religious speculation into harmony with the 
conclusions of reason and experience in the school of Latitudi- 
narian theologians who sprang from the group of thinkers which 
gathered on the eve of the Civil War around Lord Falkland at 
Great Tew, Whatever verdict history may pronounce on Falk- 
land's political career, his name must ever remain memorable in 
the history of religious thought. A new era in English relig- 
ion began with the speculations of the men he gathered around 
him. Their Avork was above all to deny the authority of tradition 
in matters of faith, as Bacon had denied it in matters of physical 
research ; and to assert in the one field as in the other the su- 
premacy of reason as a test of truth. Of the authority of the 
Church, its Fathers and its Councils, John Hales, a Canon of 
Windsor and a friend of Laud, said briefly " it is none." He 
dismissed with contempt the accepted test of universality. "Uni- 
versality is such a proof of truth as truth itself is ashamed of. 
Tlie most singular and strongest part of human authority is prop- 
erly in the wisest and the most virtuous, and these, I trow, are 
not the most universal." William Chillingworth, a man of larger 
if not keener mind, had been taught by an early conversion to 
Catholicism, and by a speedy return, the insecurity of any basis 
for belief but that of private judgment. In his "Religion of 
Protestants," he set aside ecclesiastical tradition or Church au- 
thority as grounds of faith in favor of the Bible, but only of thq 
Bible as interpreted by the common reason of men. Jeremy 
Taylor, the most brilliant of English preachers, a sufferer like 
Chillingworth on the Royalist side during the troubles, and who 
was rewarded at the Restoration Avith the bishopric of Down, 
limited even the authority of the Scriptures themselves. Reason 
was the one means which Taylor approved of in interpreting the 
Bible; but the certainty of the conclusions which reason drew 
from the Bible varied, as he held, with the conditions of reason 
itself. In all but the simplest truths of natural religion " we are 
not sure not to be deceived." The deduction of points of belief 
from the words of the Scriptures was attended with all the un- 
certainty and liability to error which sprang from the infinite 
variety of human understandings, the difficulties which hinder 
the discovery of truth, and the influences which divert the mind 
from accepting or rightly estimating it. It was plain to a mind 
like Chillingworth's that this denial of authority, this perception 
of the imperfection of reason in the discovery of absolute truth, 
struck as directly at the root of Protestant dogmatism as at the 
root of Catholic infallibility. " If Protestants are faulty in tliis 
matter [of claiming authority], it is for doing it too much and not 
too little. This presumptuous imposing of the senses of man upon 
the words of God, of the special senses of man upon the general 
words of God, and laying them upon men's consciences together 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



599 



under the equal penalty of death and damnation, this A^ain con- 
ceit that we can speak of the things of God better than in the 
words of God ; tliis deifying our own interjDretations and tyran- 
nous enforcing them upon others ; this restraining of tlie word of 
God from that latitude and generality, and the understandings 
( of men from that liberty wherein Christ and his apostles left 
1 them, is and hath been the only foundation of all the schisms of 
the Church, and that which makes them immortal." In his "Lib- 
erty of Prophecying," Jeremy Taylor pleaded the cause of toler- 
ation with a weight of argument which hardly required the tri- 
umph of the Independents and the shock of Naseby to drive it 
home. But the freedom of conscience which the Independent 
founded on the personal communion of each soul with God, the 
Latitndinarian founded on the Aveakness of authority and the 
imperfection of human reason. Taylor pleads even for the Ana- 
baptist and the Romanist. He only gives place to the action 
^of the civil magistrate in " those religions whose principles de- 
^stroy government," and " those religions — if there be any such — 
■•^which teach ill life." Hales ojjenly professed that he would quit 
the Church to-morrow if it required him to believe that all that 
dissented from it must be damned. Chillingworth denounced 
persecution in words of fire. " Take away this persecution, burn- 
i ing, cursing, damning of men for not subscribing the words of 
1 men. as the words of God ; require of Christians only to believe 
Christ, and to call n£ man master but him ; let them leave claim- 
ing infallibility that have no title to it, and let them that in 
their own words disclaim it, disclaim it also in their actions. . . . 
Protestants are inexcusable if they do offer violence to other 
men's consciences." From the denunciation of intolerance the 
Latitudinarians passed easily to the dream of comprehension 
which had haunted every nobler soul since the "Utopia" of More. 
Hales based his loyalty to the Church of England on the fact 
that it was the largest and the most tolerant Church in Chris- 
tendom. Chillingworth pointed out how many obstacles to com- 
prehension were removed by such a simplification of belief as 
flowed from a national theology. Like More, he asked for " such 
an ordering of the public service of God as that all who believe 
the Scripture and live according to it might, without scruple or 
hypocrisy or protestation, in any part join in it." Taylor, like 
Chillingworth, rested his hope of \mion on the simplification of 
belief He saw a probability of error in all the creeds and con- 
fessions adopted by Christian Churches. " Such bodies of con- 
fessions and articles," he said, " must do much hurt." " He is rather 
,' the schismatic who makes unnecessary and inconvenient impo- 
"^ sitions, than he who disobeys them because he can not do other- 
wise without violating his conscience." The Apostles' Creed in 
its literal meaning seemed to him the one term of Christian vmion 
Avhich the Church had any right to impose. 

With the Restoration the Latitudinarians came at once to the 
front. They were soon distinguished from both Puritans and High 
Churchmen by their opposition to dogma, by their preference of 



< 



Ensi.asid 

AND 

THE Revo- 
lution. 



600 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



reason to tradition — whether of the Bible or the Church, by their 
basing religion on a natural theology, by their aiming at Tight- 
ness of life rather than at correctness of opinion, by their advocacy' 
of toleration and comprehension as the grounds of Christian unity. 
Chillingworth and Taylor found successors in the restless good 
sense of Burnet, the enlightened piety of Tillotson, and the calm 
philosoj)hy of Bishop Butler. Meanwhile the impulse which such 
men were giving to religious speculation was being given to po- 
litical and social inquiry by a mind of far greater keenness and 
power. 

Bacon's fovorite secretary was Thomas Hobbes. " He was be- 
loved by his Lordship," Aubrey tells us, " who was wont to have 
him walk in his delicate groves, Avhere he did meditate ; and when 
a notion darted into his mind, Mr. Hobbes was presently to write 
it down. And his Lordship was wont to say that he did it better 
than any one else about him ; for that many times when he read 
their notes he scarce understood what they writ, because they un- 
derstood it not clearly themselves." The long life of Hobbes 
covers a memorable space in our history. He was born in the 
year of the victory over the Armada ; he died, at the age of ninety- 
two, only nine years before the Revolution. His ability soon made 
itself felt, and in his earlier days he was the secretary of Bacon, 
and the friend of Ben Jonson and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. 
But it was not till the age of fifty-four, when he withdrew to 
France on the eve of the Great Rebellion, that his speculations 
were made known to the world in his treatise "De Cive." He 
joined the exiled Court at Paris, and became mathematical tutor 
to Charles the Second, whose love and regard for him seems to^ 
have been real to the end. But his post was soon forfeited by the 
appearance of his "Leviathan;" he was forbidden to approach the 
Court, and returned to England, where he seems to have acqui- 
esced in the rule of Cromwell. The Restoration brought him a 
pension ; but his two great works were condemned by Parlia- 
ment, and " Hobbism " became, ere he died, the popular synonym 
for irreligion and immorality. Prejudice of this kind sounded 
oddly in the case of a writer who had laid down, as the two things 
necessary to salvation, faith in Christ and obedience to the law. 
But the prejudice sprang from a true sense of the effect which the 
Hobbist philosophy must necessarily have on the current religion 
and the current notions of political and social morality. Hobbes 
was the first great English writer who dealt with the science of 
government from the ground, not of tradition, but of reason. It 
was in his treatment of man in the stage of human development 
which he supposed to precede that of society that he came most 
roughly into conflict with the accepted beliefs. Men, in his theory, 
were by nature equal, and their only natural relation was a state 
of war. It was no innate virtue of man himself which created 
human society out of this chaos of warring strengths. Hobbes, 
in fact, denied the existence of the more spiritual sides of man's 
nature. His hard and narrow logic dissected every human cus- 
tom and desire, and reduced even the most sacred to demonstra- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



601 



tions of a prudent selfishness. Friendship was simply a sense of 
social utility to one another. The so-called laws of nature, such 
as gratitude or the love of our neighbor, were in fact contrary to 
the natural passions of man, and powerless to restrain them. Nor 
had religion rescued man by the interposition of a divine will. 
Nothing better illustrates the daring with which the new skepti- 
cism was to break through the theological traditions of the older 
world than the pitiless logic with which Hobbes assailed the very 
theory of revelation. " To say God hath spoken to man in a 
dream, is no more than to say man dreamed that God hath spoken 
to him." " To say one hath seen a vision or heard a voice, is to 
say he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking." Religion, 
in fact, was nothing more than " the fear of invisible powers ;" and 
here, as in all other branches of human science, knowledge dealt 
with words and not with things. It was man himself who for his 
own profit created society, by laying down certain of his natural 
rights and retaining only those of self-preservation. A covenant 
between man and man originally created "that great Leviathan 
called the Commonwealth or State, which is but an artificial man, 
though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose 
protection and defense it was intended." The .fiction of such an 
"original contract" has long been dismissed from political specu- 
lation, but its eflfect at the time of its first appearance was im- 
mense. Its almost universal acceptance put an end to the relig- 
ious and patriarchal theories of society, on which Kingship had 
till now founded its claim of a divine right to authority which 
no subject might question. But if Hobbes destroyed the old 
ground of Royal despotism, he laid a new and a firmer one. To 
create a society at all, he held that the whole body of the govern- 
ed must have resigned all rights save that of self-preservation 
into the hands of a single ruler, who was the representative of all. 
Such a ruler was absolute, for to make terms with him implied a 
man making terms with himself. The transfer of rights Avas in- 
alienable, and after generations were as much bound by it as the 
generation which made the transfer. As the head of the whole 
body, the ruler judged every question, settled the laws of civil 
justice or injustice, or decided between religion and superstition. 
His was a divine right, and the only divine right, because in him 
were absorbed all the rights of each of his subjects. It was not 
in any constitutional check that Hobbes looked for the prevention 
of tyranny, but in the common education and enlightenment as to 
their real end, and the best mode of reaching it on the part of 
both subjects and prince. And the real end of both was the weal 
of the Commonwealth at large. It was in laying boldly down 
this end of government, as well as in the basis of contract on which 
he made government repose, that Hobbes really influenced all later 
politics. Locke, like his master, derived political authority from 
the consent of the governed, and adopted the common weal as its 
end. But in the theory of Locke the people remain passively in 
possession of the power which they have delegated to the prince, 
and have the right to withdraw it if it be used for purposes incon- 



602 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



sistent with the end which society was formed to promote. To 
the origin of all power in the people, and the end of all power for 
the people's good — the two great doctrines of Hobbes — Locke 
added the right of resistance, the responsibility of princes to their 
subjects for a due execution of their trust, and the supremacy of 
legislative assemblies as the voice of the people itself It was in 
this modified and enlarged form that the new political philosophy 
revealed itself in the Revolution of 1688. 



Section II.— Tlie Restoration. 1660— 1667. 

\_Authoritles. — Clarendon's own account of his ministry in his "Life," Bishop 
Rennet's "llegister," and Burnet's lively "History of my Own Times," are our 
principal sources of information. The life of James the Second given in Macpher- 
son's "Original Papers," is of high value for this and the next period, but must 
be used with caution. For the relations of the Church and the Dissenters, see 
Neal's "History of the Puritans," Calamy's "Memoirs of the Ejected Ministers," 
Mr. Dixon's "Life of William Penn," Baxter's "Autobiography," and Bunyan's 
account of his sufferings in his various works. The social history of the time is ad- 
mirably given by Pepys in his " Memoirs." Throughout the whole reign of Charles 
the Second, the " Constitutional History " of Mr. Hallam is judicious and full in its 
information.] 

It is only by a survey of the larger tendencies of English thought 
that we can understand the course of English history in the years 
which followed the Restoration. When Charles the Second en- 
tered Whitehall, the work of the Long Parliament seemed undone. 
Not only was the Monarchy restored, but it was restored without 
restriction or condition ; and of the two great influences which 
had hitherto served as checks on its power, the first, that of Pu- 
ritanism, had become hateful to the nation at large, while the sec- 
ond, the tradition of constitutional liberty, was discredited by the 
issue of the Civil War. But amid all the tumult of demonstrative 
loyalty the great " rcA^olution of the seventeenth century," as it 
has justly been styled, went steadily on. The supreme power was 
gradually transferred from the Crown to the House of Commons, 
Step by step, Parliament drew nearer to a solution of the political 
problem which had so long foiled its efforts — the problem how to 
make its will the law of administrative action without itself un- 
dertaking the task of administration. It is only by carefully fix- 
ing our eyes on this transfer of power, and by noting the succes- 
sive steps toward its realization, that we can understand the com- 
plex history of the Restoration and the Revolution, 

The first acts of the new government showed a sense that, loyal 
as was the temper of the nation, its loyalty was by no means the 
blind devotion of the Cavalier, The chief part in the Restoration 
had in fact been played by the Presbyterians; and the Presby- 
terians were still powerful from their exclusive possession of the 
magistracy and all local authority. The first ministry, therefore, 
which Charles ventured to form, bore on it the marks of a com- 
promise. Its most influential member was Sir Edward Hyde, the 
adviser of the King during his exile, who now became Earl of 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



603 



Clarendon and Lord Chancellor. Lord Southampton, a steady 
Royalist, accepted the post of Lord Treasurer; and the devotion 
of Ormond was rewarded Avith a dukedom and the dignity of 
Lord Steward. But the Presbyterian interest was even more 
powerfully represented. Monk remained Lord General, with the 
title of Duke of Albemarle. The King's brother, James, Duke of 
York, was made Lord Admiral ; but the administration of the fleet 
was virtually in the hands of one of Cromwell's followers, Mon- 
tagu, the new Earl of Sandwich. Lord Saye and Sele was made 
Lord Privy Seal. Sir Ashley Cooper was soon rewarded for his 
services by a barony and the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
Of the two Secretaries of State, the one, Nicholas, was a devoted 
Royalist, the other, Morice, was a steady Presbyterian. Of the 
thirty members of the Privy Council, twelve had borne arras 
against the King. It was clear that such a ministry was hardly 
likely to lend itself to a mere policy of reaction ; and even its 
most Royalist members. Clarendon and SouthamiDton, were Roy- 
alists of a constitutional type. 

The policy of the new government, therefore, fell fairly in with 
the temper of the Convention, which, after declaring itself a Par- 
liament, proceeded to consider the measures which were requisite 
for a settlement of the nation. The Convention had been chosen 
under the ordinances which excluded Royalist " Malignants " from 
the right of voting; and the bulk of its members were men of 
Presbyterian sympathies, loyalist to the core, but as averse 'to 
despotism as the Long Parliament itself Li its earlier days a 
member who asserted that those who had fought against the 
King were as guilty as those who cut off his head was sternly re- 
buked from the Chair. The first measure which was undertaken 
by the House, the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion for all offenses 
committed during the recent troubles, showed at once the moder- 
ate character of the Commons. In the punishment of the Regi- 
cides, indeed, a Presbyterian might well be as zealous as a Cav- 
alier. In spite of a Proclamation he had issued in the first days 
of his return, in which mercy was virtually promised to all the 
judges of the late King who sui-rendei'ed themselves to justice, 
Charles pressed for revenge on those whom he regarded as his 
father's murderers, and the Lords went hotly with the King. It 
is to the credit of the Commons that they steadily resisted the 
cry for blood. By the original provisions of the Bill of Oblivion 
and Indemnity only seven of the living Regicides were excluded 
from pardon ; and though the rise of Royalist fervor during the 
three months in which the bill was under discussion forced the 
House in the end to leave almost all to the course of justice, the re- 
quirement of a special Act of Parliament for the execution of those 
who had surrendered under the Proclamation protected the lives 
of most of them. Twenty-eight of the King's judges were in the 
end arraigned at the bar, but only thirteen were executed, and 
only one of these, General Harrison, had played any conspicuous 
part in the rebellion. Twenty others, who had been prominent in 
what were now called "the troubles" of the past twenty years, 



604 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



were declared incapable of holding oiEce under the State ; and by 
an unjustifiable clause which was introduced into the Act before 
its final adoption, Sir Harry Vane and General Lambert, though 
they had taken no part in the King's death, were specially exempt- 
ed from the general pardon. In dealing with the questions of 
property which arose from the confiscations and transfers of es- 
tates during the civil wars, the Convention met yet greater diffi- 
culties. No opposition was made to the resumption of all crown- 
lands by the State, but the Convention desired to protect the 
rights of those who had purchased Church property, and of those 
who were in actual possession of private estates which had been 
confiscated by the Long Parliament and by the government which 
succeeded it. The bills, however, which they prepared for this 
purpose were delayed by the artifices of Hyde, and at the close of 
the session the bishops and the evicted Royalists quietly re-entered 
into the occupation of their old possessions. The Royalists, in- 
deed, were far from being satisfied with this summary confisca- 
tion. Fines and sequestrations had impoverished all the steady 
adherents of the Royal cause, and had driven many of them to 
forced sales of their estates ; and a demand was made for compen- 
sation for their losses, and the canceling of such sales. Without 
such provisions, said the frenzied Cavaliers, the bill would be " a 
Bill of Lidemnity for the King's enemies, and of Oblivion for his 
friends." But here the Convention stood firm. All transfers of 
property by sale were recognized as valid, and all claims of com- 
pensation for losses by sequestration were barred by the Act. 
From the settlement of the nation the Convention passed to the 
settlement of the relations between the nation and the Crown. So 
far was the constitutional work of the Long Parliament from be- 
ing undone, that its more important measures were silently accept- 
ed as the base of future government. Not a voice demanded the 
restoration of the Star-Chamber, or of monopolies, or of the Court 
of High Commission; no one disputed the justice of the condem- 
nation of ship-money, or the assertion of the sole right of Parlia- 
ment to grant supplies to the Crown, The militia, indeed, was 
placed in the King's hands ; but the army was disbanded, though 
Charles was permitted to keep a few regiments for his guard. The 
revenue was fixed at £1,200,000 ; and this sum was gi-anted to the 
King for life — a grant which might have been perilous for freedom 
had not the taxes provided to supply the sum fallen constantly be- 
low this estimate, while the current expenses of the Crown, even 
in time of peace, greatly exceeded it. But even for this grant a 
heavy price was exacted. Though the rights of the Crown over 
lands held, as the bulk of English estates were held, in military 
tenure, had ceased to be of any great pecuniary value, they were 
indirectly a source of considerable power. The right of wardship 
and of marriage, above all, enabled the sovereign to exercise a 
galling pressure on every landed proprietor in his social and do- 
mestic concerns. Under Elizabeth, the right of wardship had been 
used to secure the education of all Catholic minors in the Protest- 
ant faith ; and under James and his successor minors and heir- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



605 



esses had been granted to Court favorites, or sold in open market 
to the highest bidder. But the real value of these rights to the 
Crovi^n lay in the political pressure which it was able to exert 
through thezn on the country gentry. A squire was naturally 
eager to buy the good-will of a sovereign who might soon be the 
guardian of his daughter and the administrator of his estate. But 
the same motives which made the Crown cling to this prerogative 
made the Parliament anxious to do away with it. Its efforts to 
bring this about under James the First had been foiled by the 
King's stubborn resistance ; but the long interruption of these 
rights during the Avars made their revival almost impossible at 
the Restoration, and one of the first acts, therefore, of the Conven- 
tion was to free the country gentry by abolishing the claims of 
the Crown to reliefs and wardship, purveyance and pre-emj)tion, 
and by the conversion of lands held till then in chivalry into lands 
held in common socage. In lieu of his rights, Charles accepted a 
grant of £100,000 a year — a sum which it was originally purposed 
to raise by a tax on the lands thus exempted from feudal exac- 
tions, but which was provided for in the end, with less justice, by 
a general excise. 

Successful as the Convention had been in effecting the settlement 
of political matters, it failed in bringing about a settlement of the 
Church. In his proclamation from Breda, Charles had promised to 
respect liberty of conscience, and to assent to any Acts of Parlia- 
ment which should be presented to him for its security. The Con- 
vention was in the main Presbyterian, but it soon became plain 
that the continuance of a purely Presbyterian system was impossi- 
ble. "The generality of the people," wrote a shrewd Scotch ob- 
server from London, " are doting after Prelacy and the Service- 
book." The Convention, however, still hoped for some modified 
form of Episcopalian government which would enable the bulk of 
the Puritan party to remain within the Church. A large part of 
the existing clergy, indeed, were Independents, and for these no 
compromise with Episcopacy was possible ; but the greater num- 
ber were moderate Presbyterians, who were ready, " for fear of 
worse," to submit to such a plan of Church government as Arch- 
bishop Usher had proposed (a plan in which the bishop was only 
the president of a diocesan board of presbyters), and to accej)t the 
Liturgy with a few amendments and the omission of the "super- 
stitious practices." It was to a compromise of this kind that the 
King himself leaned at the beginning, and a Royal proclamation 
declared his approval of the Puritan demands ; but a bill intro- 
duced by Sir Matthew Hale to turn this proclamation into law was 
foiled by the opposition of Hyde, and by the promise of a Confer- 
ence. The ejected Episcopalian clergy who still remained alive 
entered again into their livings, the bishops returned to their sees, 
and the dissolution of the Convention-Parliament destroyed the 
last hope of an ecclesiastical compromise. The tide of loyalty had, 
in fact, been rising fast during its session, and the influence of this 
was seen in one of the latest resolutions of the Convention itself 
The bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton were torn by its 



606 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



order from their graves and hung on gibbets at Tyburn, while 
those of Pym and Blake were cast out of Westminster Abbey into 
St. Margaret's church-yard. Bat in the elections for the new Par- 
liament the zeal for Church and King swept all hope of moderation 
and compromise before it. The new members were for the most 
part young men, and " the most profane, swearing fellows," wrote 
a Puritan, Roger Pepys," that ever I heard in my life." The Pres- 
byterians sank to a handful of fifty members. The loyalty of the 
Parliament far outran that of Clarendon himself Though it con- 
firmed the acts of the Convention, it could with difiiculty be brought 
to assent to the Act of Indemnity. The Commons pressed for the 
prosecution of Vane. Vane was protected alike by the spirit of 
the law and by the King's pledge to the Convention that, even if 
convicted of treason, he would not suffer him to be brought to the 
block. But he was now brought to trial on the charge of treason 
against a King "kept out of his Royal authority by traitors and 
rebels," and his spirited defense served as an excuse for his execu- 
tion. " He is too dangerous a man to let live," Charles Avrote with 
characteristic coolness, " if we can safely put him out of the way." 
But the new members were yet better Churchmen than loyalists. 
A common suffering had thrown the gentry and the Episcopalian 
clergy together, and for the first time in our history the country 
squires were zealous for the Church. At the opening of their ses- 
sion they ordered every member to receive the communion, and 
the League and Covenant to be solemnly burned by the common 
hangman in Westminster Hall. The bishops were restored to 
their seats in the House of Lords. The conference at the Savoy 
between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians broke up in anger, 
and the few alterations made in the Liturgy were made with a 
view to disgust rather than to conciliate the Puritan partj^ The 
strongholds of this party Avere the corporations of the boroughs ; 
and an attempt was made to drive them from these by the Test 
and Corporation Act, which required a reception of the communion 
according to the rites of the Anglican Church, a renunciation of 
the League and Covenant, and a declaration that it was unlawful 
on any grounds to take up arms against the King, before admis- 
sion to municipal ofiices. A more deadly blow was dealt at the 
Puritans in the renewal of the Act of Uniformity. Not only w\as 
the use of the Prayer-book, and the Prayer-book oxAy, enforced in 
all public worship, but an unfeigned consent and assent was de- 
manded from every minister of the Church to all which was con- 
tained in it ; while, for the first time since the Reformation, all or- 
ders save those conferred by the hands of bishops were legally dis- 
allowed. It was in vain that Ashley opposed the bill fiercely in 
the Lords, and that even Clarendon, who felt that the King's word 
was at stake, pressed for the insertion of clauses enabling the Crown 
to grant dispensations from its provisions. Charles, Avhose aim 
was to procure a toleration for the Catholics by allowing the Pres- 
byterians to feel the j^ressure of persecution, assented to the bill, 
while he promised to suspend its execution by the exercise of his 
prerogative. 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



o07 



The bishops, however, were resolute to enforce the law; and on 
St. Bartholomew's day — the last day allowed for compliance with 
its requirements — nearly two thousand rectors and vicai'S, or ahout 
a fifth of the English clergy, were driven from their parishes as 
Nonconformists. No such sweeping change in the religions aspect 
of the Church had ever been seen before. The changes of the Ref- 
ormation had been brought about with little change in the clergy 
itself Even the severities of the High Commission tinder Eliza- 
beth ended in the expulsion of a few hundreds. If Laud had gone 
zealously to Avork in emptying Puritan pulpits, his zeal had been 
to a great extent foiled by the restrictions of the law, and by the 
growth of Puritan sentiment in the clergy as a whole. A far 
wider change had been brought about by the Civil War; but the 
change had been gradual, and had been wrought for the most 
part on political or moral rather than on religious grounds. The 
parsons expelled were expelled as Royalists, or as unfitted for 
their ofiice by idleness or vice or inability to preach. The change 
wrought by St. Bartholomew's day was a distinctly religious 
change, and it was a change which in its suddenness and complete- 
ness stood utterly alone. The rectors and vicars who were di'iven 
out were the most learned and the most active of their order. The 
bulk of the great livings throughout the country were in their 
hands. They stood at the bead of the London clergy, as the 
London clergy stood in general repute at the head of their class 
throughout England. They occupied the higher posts at the two 
Universities. No English divine, save Jeremy Taylor, rivaled 
Howe as a preacher. No parson was so renowned a controver- 
sialist, or so indefatigable a parish priest, as Baxter. And behind 
these men stood a fifth of the whole body of the clergy, men w^hose 
zeal and labor had diffused throughout the country a greater ap- 
pearance of piety and religion than it had ever displayed before. 
But the expulsion of these men was far more to the Church of En- 
gland than the loss of their individual services. It was the definite 
expulsion of a great party which from the time of the Reformation 
had played the most active and popular part in the life of the 
Church. It was the close of an efibrt w^hich had been going on 
ever since Elizabeth's accession to bring the English Communion 
into closer relations with the Reformed Communions of the Con- 
tinent, and into greater harmony with the religious instincts of the 
nation at large. The Church of England stood from that moment 
isolated and alone among all the Churches of the Christian world. 
The Reformation had severed it irretrievably from those which 
still clung to the obedience of the Papacy, By its rejection of all 
but episcopal orders, the Act of Uniformity severed it as irretriev- 
ably from the general body of the Protestant Churches, w^hether 
Lutheran or Reformed. And while thus cut off from all healthy 
religious communion with the world Avithout, it sank into immo- 
bility within. With the expulsion of the Puritan clergy, all 
change, all efforts after reform, all national development, suddenly 
stopped. From that time to this the Episcopal Church has been 
unable to meet the varying spiritual needs of its adherents by any 

39 



608 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



modification of its government or its worship. It stands alone 
among all the religious bodies of Western Christendom in its fail- 
ure through two hundred years to devise a single new service of 
prayer or of praise. But if the issues of St. Bartholomew's day 
have been harmful to the spiritual life of the English Church, they 
have been in the highest degree advantageous to the cause of relig- 
ious liberty. At the Restoration religious freedom seemed again 
to have been lost. Only the Independents and a few despised 
sects, such as the Quakers, upheld the right of every man to wor- 
ship God according to the bidding of his own conscience. The 
great bulk of the Puritan party, with the Presbyterians at its 
head, were at one with their opponents in desiring a uniformity of 
worship, if not of belief, throughout the land ; and had the two 
great parties within the Church held together, their weight would 
have been almost irresistible. Fortunately the great severance 
of St. Bartholomew's day drove out the Presbyterians from the 
Church to wliich they clung, and forced them into a general union 
with sects which they had hated till then almost as bitterly as the 
bishops themselves. A common persecution soon blended the 
Nonconformists into one. Persecution broke down before the num- 
bers, the Avealth, and the political weight of the new sectarians; 
and the Clnirch, for the first time in its history, found itself con- 
fronted with an organized body of Dissenters without its pale. 
The impossibility of crushing such a body as this wrested from 
English statesmen the first legal recognition of freedom of wor- 
ship in the Toleration Act ; their rapid growth in later times has 
by degrees stripped the Church of almost all the exclusive privi- 
leges which it enjoyed as a religious body, and now threatens what 
remains of its official connection with the State. With these re- 
moter consequences, however, we are not as yet concerned. It is 
enough to note here that with the Act of Uniformity and the ex- 
pulsion of the Puritan clergy a new element in our religious and 
political history — the element of Dissent, the influence of the Non- 
conformist Churches — comes first into play. 

The immediate efiect of their expulsion on the Puritans was to 
beget a feeling of despair. Many were for retiring to Holland ; 
others proposed flight to New England and the American colonies. 
Charles, however, was anxious to make use of them in carrying out 
his schemes for a toleration of the Catholics ; and fresh hopes of 
protection were raised by a Royal proclamation, which expressed 
the King's wish to exempt from the penalties of the Act " those 
who, living peaceably, do not conform themselves thereunto, 
through scruple and tenderness of misguided conscience, but mod- 
estly and without scandal perform their devotions in their own 
way." Charles promised to bring a measure to this effect before 
Parliament in its coming session. The bill Avhich was thus intro- 
duced would have enabled the King to dispense, not only with the 
provisions of the Act of Uniformity, but with all laws and statutes 
enforcing conformity in worship or imposing religious tests. Its 
aim was so obvious, and its unconstitutional character so clear, 
that even the Nonconformists Avithdrew from supporting it ; and 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



009 



Ashley alone among the Puritan leaders undertook its defense. 
The threatening attitude of the Commons soon forced the King to 
withdraw it ; but the temper of the Church was now roused, and 
the hatred of the ISTonconformists was embittered by suspicions of 
the King's secret designs. The Houses extorted from Charles a 
proclamation for the banishment of Roman Catholic priests ; and by 
their Conventicle Act of the following year they punished by fine, 
imprisonment, and transportation all meetings of more than five 
persons for any religious worship but that of the Common Prayer. 
The Five-Mile Act, a year later, completed the code of persecution. 
By its provisions every clergyman who had been driven out by 
the Act of Uniformity was called on to swear that he hold it un- 
lawful under any pretext to take up arms against the King, and 
that he would at no time " endeavor any alteration of government 
in Church or State." In case of refusal, he was forbidden to go 
within five miles of any borough, or of any place Avhere he had 
been wont to minister. As the main body of the jSTonconformists 
belonged to the city and trading classes, the eflTect of this measure 
was to rob them of any religious teaching at all. But the tide of 
religious intolerance was now slowly ebbing, and a motion to im- 
pose the oath of the Five-Mile Act on every person in the nation 
Avas rejected in the same session by a majority of six. The suifer- 
ings of the Nonconformists indeed could hardly fail to tell on the 
sympathies of the people. The thirst for revenge, which had been 
roused by the tyranny of the Presbyterians in their hour of tri- 
umph, was satisfied by their humiliation in the hour of defeat. 
The sight of pious and learned clergymen driven from their homes 
and their flocks, of religious meetings broken up by the constables, 
of preachers set side by side with thieves and outcasts in the dock, 
of jails crammed with honest enthusiasts whose piety was their 
only crime, pleaded more eloquently for toleration than all the 
reasoning in the world. We have a clew to the extent of the per- 
secution from what we know to have been its effect on a single 
sect. The Quakers had excited alarm by their extravagances of 
manner, their refusal to bear arras or to take oaths ; and a special 
Act was passed for their repression. They were one of the small- 
est of the ISTonconformist bodies, but more than four thousand 
were soon in prison, and of these five hundred were imprisoned in 
London alone. Large as it was, the number rapidly inci'eased ; 
and the King's Declaration of Lidulgence, twelve years later, set 
free twelve thousand Quakers who had found their way to the 
jails. Of the sufferings of the expelled clergy, one of their own 
number, Richard Baxter, has given us an account. "Many hun- 
dreds of these, M'ith their wives and children, had neither house nor 
bread. . . . Their congregations had enough to do, besides a small 
maintenance, to help them out of prisons, or to maintain them 
there. Though they were as frugal as possible, they could hardly 
live ; some lived on little more than brown-bread and water, many 
had but eight or ten pounds a year to maintain a family, so that 
a piece of flesh has not come to one of their tables in six weeks' 
time; their allowance could scarce afford them bread and cheese. 



610 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



One went to plow six days and preached on the Lord's day. An- 
other was forced to cut tobacco for a livelihood." But ipoverty 
Avas the least of their sufferings. They were jeered at by the play- 
ers. They were hooted through the streets by the mob. " Many 
of the ministers, being afraid to lay down their ministry after they 
had been ordained to it, preached to such as would hear them in 
fields and private houses, till they were apprehended and cast into 
jails, where many of them perished." They were excommunicated 
in the Bishops' Court, or fined for non-attendance at church ; and 
a crowd of informers grew up who made a trade of detecting the 
meetings they held at midnight. Alleyn, the author of the well- 
known " Alarm to the Unconverted," died at thirty-six from the 
sufferings lie endured in Taunton Jail. Vavasour Powell, the 
apostle of Wales, spent the eleven years which followed the Res- 
toration in prisons at Shrewsbury, Southsea, and Cardiff, till he 
perished in the Fleet. John Buuyan was for twelve years a pris- 
oner at Bedford. 

We have already seen the atmosphere of excited feeling in 
which the youth of Bunyan had been spent. From his childhood 
he heard heavenly voices, and saw visions of heaven ; from his 
childhood, too, he had been wrestling with an overpowering sense 
of sin, which sickness and repeated escapes from death did much 
to deepen as he grew up. But in spite of his self-reproaches, his 
life was a religious one; and the purity and sobriety of his youth 
was shown by his admission at seventeen into the ranks of the 
"JSTew Model," Two years later the war w?.s over, and Bunyan 
found himself married before he was twenty to a "godly" wife, 
as young and as poor as himself So jDOor were the young couple^ 
that they could hardly muster a spoon and a plate between them ; 
and the poverty of their home deepened, perhaps, the gloom of the 
young tinkei-'s restlessness and religious depression. His wife did 
what she could to comfort him, teaching him again to read and 
write, for he had forgotten his school-learning, and reading with 
him in two little " godly " books which formed his library. But the 
darkness only gathered the thicker around his imaginative soul. 
" I walked," he tells us of this time, " to a neighboring town, and 
sat down upon a settle in the street, and fell into a very deep 
pause about the most fearful state my sin had brought me to ; and 
after long musing I lifted up my head ; but methought I saw as 
if the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give me light, 
and as if the very stones in the street and tiles upon the houses 
did band themselves against me. Methought that they all com- 
bined together to banish me out of the world. I was abhorred of 
them, and wept to dwell among them, because I had sinned against 
the Saviour, Oh, how happy now was every creature over I ! for 
they stood fast and kept their station. But I was gone and lost," 
At last, after more than two years of this struggle, the darkness 
broke. Bunyan felt himself " converted," and freed from the bur- 
den of his sin. He joined a Baptist church at Bedford, and a few 
years later he became famous as a preacher. As he held no formal 
post of minister in the congregation, his preaching even under the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



611 



Protectorate was illegal, and " gave great oiFense," he tells us, " to 
the doctors and priests of that county," but he persisted with lit- 
tle real molestation until the Restoration, Six months after the 
King's return he was committed to Bedford Jail on a charge of 
preaching in unlicensed conventicles ; and his refusal to promise 
to abstain from preaching kept him there eleven years. The jail 
Avas crowded with prisoners like himself, and among them he con- 
tinued his ministry, supporting himself by making tagged thread 
laces, and finding some comfort in the Bible, the " Book of Mar- 
tyrs," and the writing materials which he was sufiered to have 
with him in his prison. But he was in the prime of life — his age 
was thirty-two when he was imprisoned — and the inactivity and 
severance from his wife and little children was hard to bear. " The 
parting with my wife and poor children," he says in words of sim- 
ple pathos, " hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of 
the flesh from the bones, and that not only because I am some- 
what too fond of those great mercies, but also because I should 
have often brought to my mind the many hardshij)S, miseries, and 
wants that my poor family was like to meet with should I be taken 
from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my 
heart than all besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hardships I thought 
my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces. 
' Poor child,' thought I, ' what sorrow art thou like to have for thy 
portion in this world ! Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer 
hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I can 
not now endure the wind should blow upon thee.'" But suffer- 
ing could not break his purpose, and Bunyan found compensation 
for the narrow bounds of his prison in the wonderful activity of 
his pen. Tracts, controversial treatises, poems, meditations, his 
" Grace Abounding," and his "Holy City," followed each other in 
quick succession. It was in his jail that he wrote the first and 
greatest part of his " Pilgrim's Progress." In no book do we see 
more clearly the new imaginative force which had been given to 
the common life of Englishmen by their study of the Bible. Its 
English is the simplest and the homeliest English which has ever 
been used by any great English writer ; but it is the English of 
the Bible. The images of the " Pilgrim's Progress " are the images 
of prophet and evangelist ; it borrows for its tenderer outbursts 
the very verse of the Song of Songs, and pictures the Heavenly City 
in the words of the Apocalypse, But so completely has the Bible 
become Bunyan's life that one feels its phrases as the natural ex- 
pression of his thoughts. He has lived in the Bible till its words 
have become his own. He has lived among its visions and voices 
of heaven till all sense of possible unreality has died away. He 
tells his tale with such a perfect naturalness that allegories be- 
come living things, that the Slough of Despond and Doubting Cas- 
tle are as real to us as places we see every day, that we know Mr, 
Legality and Mr, Worldly Wiseman as if we had met them in the 
street. It is in this amazing reality of impersonation that Bun- 
yan's imaginative genius specially displays itself But this is far I 
from being his only excellence. In its range, in its directness, in ! 



612 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



its simple grace, in the ease with which it changes from living 
dialogue to dramatic action, from simple pathos to passionate ear- 
nestness, in the subtle and delicate fancy winch often suffuses its 
childlike words, in its playful hunior, its bold character-painting, 
in the even and balanced power which passes without effort from 
the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the land " where the Shining 
Ones commonly walked, because it was on the borders of Heaven," 
in its sunny kindliness, unbroken by one bitter word, the " Pilgi'im's 
Progress " is among the noblest of English poems. For if Puri- 
tanism had first discovered the poetry which contact with the spir- 
itual world awakes in the meanest souls, Bunyan was the first of 
the Puritans who revealed this poetry to the outer world. The 
journey of Christian from the City of Destruction to the Heaven- 
ly City is simply a record of the life of such a Puritan as Bunyan 
himself, seen through an imaginative haze of spiritual idealism in 
which its commonest incidents are heightened and glorified. He 
is himself the Pilgrim who flies from the City of Destruction, who 
climbs the hill Difiiculty, who faces Apollyon, who sees his loved 
ones cross the river of Death toward the Heavenly City, and how, 
because "the hill on which the City was framed was higher than 
the clouds, t\iQj therefore went up through the region of the air, 
sweetly talking as they went." 

The popularity which the "Pilgrim's Progress" enjoyed from 
the first proves that the religious sympathies of the English peo- 
ple were still mainly Puritan. Before Bunyan's death in 1G88 ten 
editions of the book had already been sold, and though even Cow- 
per hardly dared to quote it for fear of moving a sneer in the po- 
lite world of his day, its favor among the middle classes and the^ 
jDOor has grown steadily from its author's day to our own. It is 
probably the most popular and the most widely known of all En- 
glish books. But the inner current of the national life had little 
relation to the outer history of the Restoration. While Bunyan 
was lying in Bedford Jail, and the Church was carrying on its bit- 
ter persecution of the ISTonconformists, England was plunging into 
a series of humiliations and losses without example in her historJ^ 
The fatal strife with Holland, which had been closed bj^ the wis- 
dom of Cromwell, was renewed. The quarrel of the Dutch and En- 
glish merchants on the Guinea coast, where both sought a monop- 
oly of the trade in gold-dust and slaves, was fanned by the ambi- 
tion of the Duke of York, and by the resentment of Charles him- 
self at the insults he had suffered from Holland in his exile, into a 
war. An obstinate battle ofi" Lowestoft ended in a victory for the 
English fleet; but in a subsequent encounter with De Ruyter off 
the K'orth Foreland Monk and his fleet were only saved from de- 
struction by the arrival of a reinforcement under Prince liuj^ert. 
" They may be killed," said De Witt, " but they can not be con- 
quered ;" and the saying was as true of one side as of the other. 
A third battle, as hard-fought as its predecessors, ended in the tri- 
umph of the English, and their fleet sailed along the coast of Hol- 
land, burning ships and towns. But the thought of triumph was 
soon forgotten in the terrible calamities which fell on the capital. 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



613 



In six months a hundred thousand Londoners died of the Plague 
which broke out in its crowded streets ; and the Plague was fol- 
lowed by a fire, Avhich, beginning near Fish Street, reduced the 
whole city to ashes from the Tower to the Temple. Thirteen 
hundred houses and ninety churches were destroyed. The loss of 
merchandise and property was beyond count. The Treasury was 
empty, and neither ships nor forts were manned, when the Dutch 
fleet appeared in the Nore, advanced unopposed up the Thames 
to Gravesend, forced the boom which protected the Med way, 
burned three men-of-war which lay anchored in the river, and for 
six weeks sailed proudly along the southern coast, the masters of 
the Channel. 



Section III.— Cliarles the Second. 1667—1673. 

{^Authorities. — To Burnet, Kennet, and the other authorities mentioned for the 
preceding period, we may add the Memoirs of Sir William Temple, with Lord Ma- 
caulay's well-known Essay on that statesman, Reresby's Memoirs, and the works 
of Andrew Marv ell. The "Memoirs of the Count de Grammont," by Anthony 
Hamilton, give a witty and amusing picture of the life of the Count and of Charles 
himself. Lingard becomes of high importance during this and the following period 
from the original materials he has used, and from his clear and dispassionate state- 
ment of the Catholic side of the question. See, too, for this the account of James 
himself in Macpherson's "State Papers." Dalrymple, in his "Memoirs cf Great 
Britain and Ireland," was the first to discover the real secret of the negotiations 
with France ; but all previous researches have been superseded by those of M. Mi- 
gnet, whose " Ne'gociations relatives a la succession d'Espagne" (Paris, 1835) is 
indispensable for a real knowledge of this and the following period.] 



The thunder of the Dutch guns in the Meclway and the Thames 
awoke England to a bitter sense of its degradation. The dream 
of loyalty was over. "Every body nowadays," Pepys tells ufs, 
" reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, 
and made all the neighbor princes fear him." But Oliver's succes- 
sor was coolly watching this shame and discontent of his people 
Avith the one aim of turning it to his own advantage. To Charles 
the Second the degradation of England was only a move in the po- 
litical game which he was playing, a game played with so consum- 
mate a secrecy and skill that it deceived not only the closest ob- 
servers of his own day but still misleads historians of ours. What 
his subjects saw in their King was a pleasant, brown-faced gentle- 
man, playing with his spaniels or drawing caricatures of his minis- 
ters, or flinging cakes to the water-fowl in the park. To all outer 
seeming Charles was the most consummate of idlers. " He delight- 
ed," says one of his courtiers, "in a bewitching kind of pleasure 
called sauntering." The business-like Pepys soon discovered that 
" the King do mind nothing but pleasures, and hates the very sight 
or thoughts of business," He only laughed when Tom Killigrew 
frankly told him that, badly as things were going, there was one 
man whose employment would soon set them right, " and this is 
one Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in employing his lips 
about the Court, and hath no other employment." Ihat Charles 



614 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



had great natural parts no one doubted. In his earlier days of de- 
feat and danger he showed a cool courage and presence of mind 
which never failed him in the many perilous moments of his reign. 
His temper was pleasant and social, his manners perfect, and there 
was a careless freedom and courtesy iu his address which Avon over 
every body who came into his presence. His education indeed had 
been so grossly neglected that he could hardly read a plain Latin 
book; but his natui^al quickness and intelligence showed itself iu 
his pursuit of chemistry and anatomy, and in the interest lie showed 
in the scientific inquiries of the Royal Society. Like Peter the 
Great, his favorite study was that of naval arclvitecturc, and he 
piqued himself on being a clever ship-builder. He had some little 
love too for art and poetry, and a taste for music. But his slirewd- 
ness and vivacity showed itself most in his endless talk. He was 
fond of telling stories, and he told them with a good deal of grace 
and humor. His humor, indeed, never forsook him : even on his 
death-bed he turned to the weeping courtiers around, and whispered 
an apology for having been so unconscionable a time in dying. He 
held his own fairly with the wits of his Court, and bandied repar- 
tees on equal terms with Sedley or Buckingham. Even Rochester 
in his merciless epigram was forced to own that " Charles never 
said a foolish thing." He had inherited, in fact, his grandfather's 
gift of pithy sayings, and his cynical irony often gave an amusing 
turn to them. When his brother, the most unpopular man in En- 
gland, solemnly warned him of plots against his life, Chailes laugh- 
ingly bid him set all fear aside. " They will never kill me, James," 
he said, "to make you king." But courage and wit and ability 
seemed to have been bestowed on him in vain. Charles hated busi-. 
ness. Lie gave no sign of ambition. The one thing he seemed in 
earnest about was sensual jileasure, and he took his pleasure with 
a cynical shamelessness which aroused the disgust even of his 
shameless courtiers. Mistress followed mistress, and the guilt of 
a troop of profligate women was blazoned to the world by the gift 
of titles and estates. The royal bastards were set among English 
nobles. The Ducal house of Grafton springs from the King's adul- 
tery with Barbara Palmer, whom he created Duchess of Cleveland. 
The Dukes of St. Albans owe their origin to his intrigue AvithlSTell 
Gwynn, a player and a courtesan. Louise de Querouaille, a mis- 
tress sent by France to win him to its interests, became Duchess of 
Portsmouth, and ancestress of the house of Richmond. An earlier 
mistress, Lucy Walters, had made him father in younger days of 
the boy whom he raised to the Dukedom of Monmouth, and to 
whom the Dukes of Buccleugh trace their line. But Charles was 
far from being content with these recognized mistresses, or with a 
single form of self-indulgence. Gambling and drinking helped to 
fill up the vacant moments when he could no longer toy with his 
favorites or bet at Newmarket. JSTo thought of remorse or of 
shame seems ever to have crossed his mind. " He could not think 
God would make a man miserable," he said once, " only for tak- 
ing a little pleasure out of the way." From shame indeed he was 
shielded by his cynical disbelief in human virtue. Virtue he re- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



615 



garded simply as a trick by which clever hypocrites imposed 
upon fools. Honor among men seemed to him as mere a pretense 
as chastity among women. Gratitude he had none, for he looked 
upon self-interest as the only motive of men's actions; and though 
soldiers had died and women had risked their lives for him, he 
" loved others as little as he thought they loved him." But if he 
felt no gratitude for benefits, he felt no resentment for wrongs. 
He was incapable either of love or of hate. The only feeling he 
retained for his fellow-men was that of an amused contempt 

It was difficult for Englishmen to believe that any real danger 
to liberty could come from an idler and a voluptuary such as 
Charles the Second. But in the very difficulty of believing this 
lay half the King's strength. He had, in fact, no taste whatever 
for the despotism of the Stuarts who had gone before him. His 
shrewdness laughed his grandfather's theories of divine right 
down the wind. His indolence made such a personal administra- 
tion as that which his father delighted in burdensome to him : he 
was too humorous a man to care for the pomp and show of power, 
and too good-natured a man to play the tyrant. "He told Lord 
Essex," Burnet says, " that he did not wish to be like a Grand 
Signior, with some mutes about him, and bags of bowstrings to 
strangle men; but he did not think he was a king so long as a 
company of fellows were looking into his actions, and examining 
his ministers as well as his accounts." "A king," he thought, 
"who might be checked, and have his ministers called to an ac- 
count, was but a king in name." In other words, he had no set- 
tled plan of tyranny, but he meant to rule as independently as he 
could, and from the beginning to the end of his reign there never 
was a moment when he Avas not doing something to carry out his 
aim. But he carried it out in a tentative, irregular fashion which 
it was as hard to detect as to meet. Whenever there Avas any 
strong opposition he gave way. If popular feeling demanded 
the dismissal of his ministers, he dismissed them. If it protested 
against his declaration of Indulgence, he recalled it. If it cried 
for victims in the frenzy of the Popish Plot, he gave it victims till 
the frenzy was at an end. It was easy for Charles to yield and 
to wait, and just as easy for him to take up the thread of his pur- 
pose again the moment the pressure was over. The one fixed re- 
solve which overrode every other thought in the King's mind was 
a resolve " not to set out on his travels again." His father had 
fallen through a quarrel with the two Houses, and Charles was 
determined to remain on good terms Avith the Parliament till he 
Avas strong enough to pick a quarrel to his profit. He treated 
the Lords with an easy familiarity Avhicli robbed opposition of its 
seriousness. " Their debates amused him," he said in his indolent 
Avay; and he stood chatting before the fire Avhile peer after peer 
poured invectives on his ministers, and laughed louder than the 
rest when Shaftesbury directed his coarsest taunts at the barren- 
ness of the Queen. Courtiers were intrusted Avith the secret 
" management " of the Commons : obstinate country gentlemen 
were brought to the Roval closet to kiss the King's liand and 



616 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



listen to the King's pleasant stories of his escape after Worcester; 
and yet more obstinate country gentlemen were bribed. Where 
bribes, flattery, and management failed, Charles Avas content to 
yield and to wait till his time came again. Meanwhile he went 
on patiently gathering up what fragments of the old Royal power 
still survived, and availing himself of whatever new resources of- 
fered themselves. If he could not undo what Puritanism had 
done in England, he could undo its work in Scotland and in Ire- 
land. Before the Civil War these kingdoms had served as useful 
checks on English liberty, and by simply regarding the Union 
which tlie Long Parliament and the Protector had brought about 
as a nullity in law, it was possible they might become checks 
again. In his undoing the Union, Charles was supported by Clar- 
endon and the Constitutional loyalists, partly from sheer abhor- 
rence of changes wrought by their political opponents, and partly 
from a dread that the Scotch and Irish members would form a 
party in the English Parliament which would always be at the 
service of the Crown. In both the lesser kingdoms, too, a meas- 
ure which seemed to restore somewhat of their independence Avas 
for the moment popular. But the results of this step were quick 
in developing themselves. In Scotland the Covenant was at once 
abolished. The new Scotch Parliament at Edinburgh, which soon 
won the name of the Drunken Parliament, outdid the wildest loy- 
alty of the English Cavaliers by annulling in a single Act all the 
proceedings of its predecessors during the last eight-and-twenty 
years. By this measure the whole Church system of Scotland fell 
legally to the ground. The General Assembly had already been 
prohibited from meeting by Cromwell; the kirk-sessions and min- 
isters' synods were now suspended. The bishops were again re- 
stored to their spiritual pre-eminence, and to their seats in Parlia- 
ment. An iniquitous trial sent the Earl of Argyle, the only noble 
strong enough to oppose the Royal will, to the block. The gov- 
ernment was intrusted to a knot of profligate statesmen, who were 
directed by Lord Lauderdale, one of the ablest and most unscrupu- 
lous of the King's ministers; and their policy was steadily direct- 
ed to the two purposes of humbling Presbyterianism — as the force 
which could alone restore Scotland to freedom, and enable her to 
lend aid as before to English liberty in any struggle with tlie 
Crown — and of raising a Royal army, which might be ready in 
case of trial to march over the border to the King's support. In 
Ireland the dissolution of the Union brought back the bishops to 
their sees ; but whatever wish Charles may have had to restore 
the balance of Catholic and Protestant as a source of power to the 
Crown was bafiled by the obstinate resistance of the Protestant 
settlers to any plans for redressing the confiscations of Cromwell. 
Five years of bitter struggle between the dispossessed loyalists 
and the new occupants left the Protestant ascendency unimpaired; 
and, in spite of a nominal surrender of one third of the confiscated 
estates to their old possessors, hardly a sixth of the profitable land 
in the island remained in Catholic holding. The claims of the 
Duke of Ormond, too, made it necessai'y to leave the government 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



617 



in his hands, and Ormond's loyalty was too moderate and consti- 
tutional to lend itself to any of the schemes of absolute rule which 
under Tyrconnell played so great a part in the next reign. But 
the severance of the two kingdoms from England was in itself a 
gain to the Royal authority ; and Charles turned quietly to the 
building up of a Royal army at home. A standing army had be- 
come so hateful a thing to the body of the nation, and above all 
to the Royalists whom the New Model had trodden under foot, 
that it was impossible to propose its establishment. But in the 
mind of both the Royal brothers their father's downfall had been 
owing to the want of a disciplined .force which would have tram- 
pled out the first efforts of national resistance; and while disband- 
ing the New Model, Charles availed himself of the alarm created 
by a mad rising of some Fifth-Monarchy men in London, under an 
old soldier called Venner, to retain five thousand horse and foot in 
his service under the name of his guards, A body of " gentlemen 
of quality and veteran soldiers, excellently clad, mounted, and or- 
dered," was thus kept ready for service near the Royal person ; 
and, in spite of tlie scandal which it aroused, the King persisted, 
steadily but cautiously, in gradually increasing its numbers. 
Twenty years later it had grown to a force of seven thousand 
foot and one thousand seven hundred horse and dragoons at home, 
Avith a reserve of six fine regiments abroad in the service of the 
United Provinces. 

But Charles was too quick-witted a man to believe, as his broth- 
er James believed, that it was possible to break down English 
freedom by the Royal power or by a few thousand men in arms. 
It was still less possible by such means to break down, as he wished 
to break down, English Protestantism. In heart, whether the story 
of his renunciation of Protestantism during Ins exile be true or not, 
he had long ceased to be a Protestant. Whatever religious feel- 
ing he had was on the side of Catholicism; he encouraged conver- 
sions among his courtiers, and the last act of his life was to seek 
formal admission into the Roman Church. But his feelings were 
rather political than religious. He saw that despotism in the State 
could hardly co-exist with free inquiry and free action in matters 
of the conscience, and that government, in his own words, "was a 
safer and easier thing where the authority was believed infallible, 
and the faith and submission of the people were implicit." The 
difficulties of a change of religion probably seemed the less to him 
that he had long lived abroad, where the sight of a people chang- 
ing its belief with a change in its sovereign's faith was not a very 
I'are one. But though he counted much on the dissensions between 
Protestant Churchmen and Protestant Dissenters, and tAVO years 
after his accession dispatched a secret agent to Rome to arrange 
a reconciliation with the Papacy, he saw that for any real success 
in his political or religious aims he must seek resources elsewhere 
than at home. At this moment France was the dominant power 
in Europe. Its young King, Lewis the Fourteenth, avowed him- 
self the champion of Catholicism and despotism against civil and 
religious liberty throughout the world. France Avas the Avoalthiest 



618 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of European powers, and her subsidies could free Charles from 
dependence on his Parliament. Her army was the finest in the 
world, and French soldiers could put down any resistance from 
English patriots. The aid of Lewis could alone realize the aims 
of Charles, and Charles was freed by nature from any shame or 
reluctance to pay the price which Lewis demanded for his aid. 
The price was that of a silent concurrence in his designs on Spain. 
Robbed of its chief source of wealth by the revolt of the United 
Provinces and the decay of Flanders, enfeebled within by the per- 
secution of the Inquisition, by the suppression of civil freedom, 
and by a ruinous financial oppression, Spain had not only ceased 
to threaten Europe, but herself trembled at the threats of France. 
The aim of Lewis was to rob it of the Low Countries ; but the 
presence of the French in Flanders was equally distasteful to En- 
gland and to Holland, and in such a contest Spain was sure of the 
aid both of these states and of the Empire. For some years Lewis 
contented himself with perfecting his army, and preparing by skill- 
ful negotiations to make such a league of the great powers against 
him impossible. His first success in England was in the marriage 
of the King. Portugal, which had only just shaken ofi' the rule 
of Spain, was really dependent upon France; and in accejDting the 
hand of Catharine of Braganza in spite of the protests of Spain, 
Charles announced his adhesion to the alliance of Lewis. Already 
English opinion saw the danger of such a course, and veered around 
to the Spanish side. As early as 1661 the London mob backed 
the Spanish embassador in a street squabble for precedence Avith 
the embassador of France. "We do all naturally love the Span- 
ish," says Pepys, " and hate the French." The sale of Dunkirk, 
the one result of Cromwell's victories, to France fanned the nation- 
al irritation to frenzy ; and the war with Holland seemed at one 
time likely to end in a war with Lewis. The war was in itself a 
serious stumbling-block in the way of his projects. To aid either 
side was to throw the other on the aid of Austria and Spain, and 
to build up a league which would check France in its aims ; and 
yet the peace which could alone enable Lewis to seize Flanders 
by keeping the states of Europe disunited was impossible without 
some sort of intervention. He Avas forced, therefore, to give aid 
to Holland, and the news of his purpose at once roused England 
to a hope of war. When Charles announced it to the Houses, 
" there was a great noise," says Louvois, " in the Parliament to 
show the joy of the t^wo Houses at the prospect of a fight with us." 
But the dexterous delays of Charles were seconded by the skill 
with which Lewis limited his aid to the exact force which was 
needful to bring about a close of the war, and the sudden con- 
clusion of peace again left the ground clear for his diplomatic in- 
trigues. 

In England the irritation was great and universal, but it took a 
turn which helped to carry out the plans of the King. From the 
moment when his bill to vest a dispensing power in the Crown 
had been defeated by Clarendon's stubborn opposition, Charles 
had resolved to rid himself of the Chancellor. The Presbyterian 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



619 



party, represfeted by Ashley, united with Arlington and the min- 
isters who were really in favor of Catholicism to bring about his 
overthrow. But Clarendon was still strong in the support of the 
House of Commons, whose Churchmanship was as resolute as his 
own. Foiled in their efforts to displace him, his rivals availed 
themselves of the jealousy of the merchant -class to drive him 
against his will into the war with Holland ; and though the Chan- 
cellor succeeded in forcing the Five -Mile Act through the two 
Houses in the teeth of Ashley's protests, the calculations of his 
enemies were soon verified. The failures and shame of the war 
broke the union between Clarendon and the Parliament ; his pride 
and venality had made him unpopular with the nation at large ; 
and the threat of an impeachment enabled Charles to gratify his 
long-hoarded revenge by the dismissal of the Chancellor from his 
office, and by an order to quit the realm. By the exile of Claren- 
don, the death of Southampton, and the retirement of Ormond and 
Nicholas, the Cavalier party in the Council ceased to exist ; and 
the section which had originally represented the Presbyterians, 
and which under the guidance of Ashley had struggled in vain 
for toleration against the Churchmen and the Parliament, came 
to the front of affairs. The religious policy of Charles had as 
yet been defeated by the sturdy Churchmanship of the Parlia- 
ment, the influence of Clarendon, and the reluctance of the Pres- 
byterians as a body to accept the Royal "indulgence" at the price 
of a toleration of Catholicism and a recognition of the King's pow- 
er to dispense with Parliamentary statutes. But there were signs 
in the recent conduct of the Parliament and in its break with 
the Chancellor that the policy of persecution had been overdone. 
Charles trusted that the pressure put on the Nonconformists by 
the Conventicle Act and the Five-Mile Act would drive them to 
seek relief at almost any cost, and he again proposed a general 
toleration. He looked to Ashley and his party for support. But 
their temper was already changed. Instead of toleration, they 
pressed for a union of Protestants which would have utterly foiled 
the King's projects ; and a scheme of Protestant comprehension, 
which had been approved by the moderate divines on both sides — 
by Tillotson and Stillingfleet on the part of the Church, as well as 
by Manton and Baxter on the part of the Nonconformists — was 
laid by the new Minister before the House of Commons. Even its 
rejection failed to bring Ashley and his party back to their old 
position. They were still for toleration, but only for a toleration 
the benefit of which did not extend to Catholics, " in respect the 
laws have determined the principles of the Romish religion to be 
inconsistent with the safety of your Majesty's person and govern- 
ment." The policy of the Council at home was determined, in- 
deed, by the look of public affairs abroad. Lewis had quickly 
shown the real cause of the eagerness with which he had pressed 
on the Peace of Breda between England and the Dutch, He had 
secured the non-interference of the Emperor by a secret treaty which 
shared the Spanish dominions between the two monarchs in case 
the King of Spain died without an heir. England, as he believed, 



620 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



was held in check by Charles, and Holland was too 'exhausted by 
the late war to interfere alone. On the very day therefore on 
which the treaty was signed he sent in his formal claims on the 
Low Countries ; his army at once took the field, and the fall of 
six fortresses without resistance left Turenne master of Flanders. 
Holland at once protested and armed; but it could do nothing 
without aid, and its appeal to England remained unanswered. 
Lewis was ready to pay a high price for English neutrality. He 
offered to admit England to a share in the eventual partition of 
the Spanish monarchy, and to assign to her the American posses- 
sions of the Spanish crown, if she would assent to his schemes on 
the Low Countries. Charles was already, in fact, engaged in secret 
negotiations on this basis, but the projects of the King wei'e soon 
checked by the threatening tone of the Parliament, and by the at- 
titude of his own ministers. To Ashley and his followers an in- 
crease of the French power seemed dangerous to English Protest- 
antism, Even Arlington, Catholic as in heart he was, thought 
more of the political interests of England, and of the invariable 
resolve of its statesmen since Elizabeth's day to keep the French 
out of Flanders, than of the interests of Catholicism. Lewis, 
warned of his danger, still strove to win over English opinion by 
offers of peace on moderate terms, while he was writing to Tu- 
renne, " I am turning over in my head things that are far from 
impossible, and go to carry them into execution whatever they 
may cost." Three armies were, in fact, ready to march on Spain, 
Germany, and Flanders, when Arlington dispatched Sir William 
Temple to the Hague, and the signature of a Triple Alliance be- 
tween England, Holland, and Sweden bound Lewis to the tern\s 
he had offered as a blind, and forced on him the Peace of Aix-la- 
Chapelle. 

Few measures have won a greater popularity than the Triple 
Alliance. "It is the only good public thing," says Pepys, "that 
hath been done since the King came to England." Even the Tory 
Dryden counted among the worst of Shaftesbury's crimes that 
" the Triple Bond he broke." In form, indeed, the Alliance simply 
bound Lewis to adhere to terms of peace proposed by himself, and 
those advantageous terms. But, in fact, as Ave have seen, it utter- 
ly ruined his plans. It brought about that union of the powers of 
Europe against which, as he felt instinctively, his ambition would 
dash itself in vain. It was Arlington's aim to make the Alliance 
the nucleus of a greater confederation ; and he tried not only to 
perpetuate it, but to include within it the Swiss Cantons, the Em- 
pire, and the House of Austria. His efforts were foiled; but the 
" Triple Bond " bore within it the germs of the Grand Alliance 
which at last saved Europe. To England it at once brought back 
the reputation which she had lost since the death of Cromwell. 
It was, in fact, a return to the Protector's policy of a league with 
the Protestant powers of the North as a security against the ag- 
gression of the Catholic powers of the South. But it was not so 
much the action of England which had galled the pride of Lewis 
as the energy and success of Holland. That " a nation of shop- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



621 



keepers" (for Lewis applied the phrase to Holland long before 
Napoleon applied it to England) should have foiled his plans at 
the very moment of their realization "stung him," he owned, "to 
the quick." If he refrained from an instant attack it was to nurse 
a surer revenge. His steady aim during the three years which 
followed the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was to isolate the United 
Provinces, to bring about again the neutrality of the Empire, to 
break the Triple Alliance by detaching Sweden and by securing 
Charles, and to leave his prey without help, save from the idle 
good-will of Brandenburg and Spain. His diplomacy was every 
where successful, but it was nowhere so successful as with En- 
gland. Cliarles had been stirred to a momentary pride by the 
success of the Triple Alliance, but he had never seriously aban- 
doned his policy, and he was resolute at last to play an active part 
in realizing it. It was clear that little was to be hoped for from 
his old plans of uniting the Catholics and the Nonconformists, and 
from this moment he surrendered himself utterly to France. The 
Triple Alliance was hardly concluded when he declared to Lewis 
his purpose of entering into an alliance with him, oiFensive and de- 
fensive. He owned to being the only man in his kingdom who de- 
sired such a league, but he was determined to realize liis desire, 
whatever might be the sentiments of his ministers. His ministers, 
indeed, he meant either to bring over to his schemes or to outwit. 
Two of them, Arlington and Sir Thomas Clifford, were Catholics 
in heart like the King ; and they were summoned, with the Duke 
of York, who had already secretly embraced Catholicism, to a con- 
ference in which Charles, after pledging them to secrecy, declared 
himself a Catholic, and asked their counsel as to the means of es- 
tablishing the Catholic religion in his realm. It was resolved by 
the four to apply to Lewis for aid in this purpose; and Charles 
proceeded to seek from the King a " protection," to use the words 
of the French embassador, " of which he has always hoped to feel 
the powerful effects in the execution of his design of changing the 
present state of religion in England for a better, and of establish- 
ing his authority so as to be able to retain his subjects in the obe- 
dience they owe him." He offered to declare his religion, and to 
join France in an attack on Holland, if Lewis would grant him a 
subsidy equal to a million a year. On this basis a secret treaty 
was negotiated in the year 1670 at Dover betwa^en Charles and 
his sister Henrietta, the Duchess of Orleans. It provided that 
Charles should announce his conversion, and tliat in case of any 
disturbance arising from such a step he should be supported by a 
French army and a French subsidy. War was to be declared by 
both powers against Holland, England furnishing a small land 
force, but bearing the chief burden of the contest at sea, on con- 
dition of an annual subsidy of three millions of francs. In the 
event of the King of Spain's death Avithout a son, Charles prom- 
ised to support France in her claims upon Flanders. 

Nothing marks better the political profligacy of the age than 
that Arlington, the author of the Triple Alliance, should have been 
cliosen as the confidant of Charles in his Treaty of Dover. But 



622 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



to all save Arlington and Clifford the King's change of religion or 
his political aims remained utterly unknown. It would have been 
impossible to obtain the consent of the party in the Royal Council 
which represented the old Presbyterians, of Ashley or Lauderdale 
or the Duke of Buckingham, to the Treaty of Dover, But it was 
possible to trick them into approval of a war with Holland by 
playing on their desire for a toleration of the Nonconformists. 
The announcement of the King's Catholicism was therefore de- 
ferred; and a series of mock negotiations, carried on through 
Buckingham, ended in the conclusion of a sham treaty which was 
communicated to Lauderdale and to Ashley — a treaty which sup- 
pressed all mention of the religious changes or of the promise of 
French aid in bringing them about, and simply stijDulated for a 
joint war against the Dutch. In such a war there was no formal 
breach of the Triple Alliance, for the Triple Alliance only provid- 
ed against an attack on the dominions of Sjjain, and Ashley and 
his colleagues were lured into assent to it in 1671 by the promise 
of a toleration on their own terms. Charles, in fact, yielded the 
point to which he had hitherto clung, and, as Ashley demanded, 
promised that no Catholic should be benefited by the Indulgence. 
The bargain once struck, and his ministers outwitted, it only re- 
mained for Charles to outwit his Parliament. A large subsidy 
was demanded for the fleet, under the pretext of upholding the 
Triple Alliance, and the subsidy was no sooner granted than the 
two Houses were adjourned. Fresh supplies were obtained by 
closing the Exchequer, and suspending — under Clifford's advice — 
the payment of either principal or interest on loans advanced to 
the public Treasury. The measure spread bankruptcy among half 
the goldsmiths of London; but it was followed in 1672 by one yet 
more startling — the Declaration of Indulgence, By virtue of his 
ecclesiastical powers, the King ordered " that all manner of penal 
laws on matters ecclesiastical against whatever sort of Noncon- 
formists or recusants should be from that day suspended," and 
gave liberty of public worship to all dissidents save Catholics,who 
were allowed to practice their religion only in private houses. 
The effect of the Declai-ation went far to justify Ashley and his 
colleagues (if any thing could justify their course) in the bargain 
by which they purchased toleration. Ministers returned, after 
years of banishment, to their homes and their flocks. Chapels 
were reopened. The jails Avere emptied. Banyan left his prison 
at Bedford ; and thousands of Quakers, who had been the especial 
objects of persecution, were set free to worshij) God after their 
own fashion. 

The Declaration of Indulgence was at once followed by a decla- 
ration of Avar against the Dutch on the part of both England and 
France ; and the success of the Allies seemed at first complete. 
The French army passed the Rhine, overran three of the states 
without opposition, and pushed its outposts to within sight of Am- 
sterdam. It was only by skill and desperate courage that the 
Dutch ships under De Ruyter held the English fleet under the 
Duke of York at bay in an obstinate battle off the coast of Suffolk. 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



G23 



The triumph of the English cabinet was shown in the elevation of 
both its parties. Ashley was made Chancellor and Earl of Shaftes- 
bury, and Cliflbrd became Lord Treasure!'. But the Dutch were 
saved by the pride with which Lewis rejected their offers of sub- 
mission, and by the approach of winter which suspended his opera- 
tions. The plot of the two Courts hung for success on the chances 
of a rapid surprise ; and with the appointment of the young Prince 
of Orange to the command of the Dutch army all chance of a sur- 
prise was over. Young as he was, William of Orange at once dis- 
played the cool courage and tenacity of his race. "Do you not 
see your country is lost ?" asked the Duke of Buckingham, who 
had been sent to negotiate at the Hague. "There is a sure way 
never to see it lost," replied William, " and that is — to die in the 
last ditch." The unexpected delay forced on Charles a fresh as- 
sembly of the Parliament ; for the supplies which he had so un- 
scrupulously procured were already exhausted, while the closing 
of the Treasury had shaken all credit and rendered it impossible 
to raise a loan. It was necessary in 1673 to appeal to the Com- 
mons, but the Commons met in a mood of angry distrust. The 
war, unpopular as it was, they left alone. What overpowered all 
other feelings was a vague sense, which we know now to have been 
justified by the facts, that liberty and religion were being un- 
scrupulously betrayed. There was a suspicion that the whole 
armed force of the nation was in Catholic hands. The Duke of 
York was believed to be in heart a Papist, and he was in command 
of the fleet. Catholics had been placed as ofiicers in the force 
which was being raised for the war in Holland, and a French gen- 
eral, the Count of Schomberg, had been sent to take command of 
it. Lady Castlemaine,the King's mistress, paraded her conversion ; 
and doubts were fast gathering over the Protestantism of the King. 
There was a general suspicion that a plot was on foot for the es- 
tablishment of Catholicism and despotism, and that the war and 
the Lidulgence were parts of the plot. The change of temper in 
the Commons was marked by th-e appearance of what was from 
that time called the Country party, with Lords Russell and Cav- 
endish and Sir William Coventry at its head — a party which sym- 
pathized with the Nonconformists, but looked on it as its first duty 
to guard against the designs of the Court. As to the Declaration 
of Lidulgence, however, all parties in the House were at one. The 
Commons resolved "that penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical 
can not be suspended but by consent of Parliament," and refused 
supplies till the Declaration was recalled. The King yielded ; but 
the Declaration was no sooner recalled than a Test Act was passed 
through both Houses without opposition, which required from 
every one in the civil and military employment of the State the 
oaths of allegiance and supremacy, a declaration against transub- 
stantiation, and a reception of the sacrament according to the rites 
of the Church of England. Clifford at once counseled resistance, 
and Buckingham talked flightily about bringing the army to Lon- 
don, but Arlington saw that all hope of carrying the "great plan" 
through was at an end, and pressed Charles to yield. A dissolu- 

40 



C24 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



tion was the King's only resource, but in the temper of the nation 
a new Parliament would have been yet more violent than the 
present one; and Charles sullenly gave way. No measure has 
ever brought about more startling results. The Duke of York 
owned himself a Catholic, and resigned his office as Lord High 
Admiral. Tiirongs of excited people gathered around the Lord 
Treasurer's house at the news that Clifford, too, had owned to be- 
ing a Catholic, and had laid down his staff of office. Their resig- 
nation was followed by that of hundreds of others in the army and 
the civil service of the Crown. On public opinion the effect was 
wonderful. "I dare not write all the strange talk of the town," 
says Evelyn. The resignations were held to have ijroved the ex- 
istence of the dangers which the Test Act had been passed to meet. 
From this mouient all trust in Charles was at an end. "The 
King," Shaftesbury said bitterly, " who if he had been so happy 
as to have been born a private gentleman had certainly passed for 
a man of good parts, excellent breeding, and well-natured, hath 
now, being a Prince, brought his affairs to that pass that there is 
not a person in the world, man or woman, that dares rely upon 
liim or put any confidence in his word or friendship." 



Section IV.-Danby. 1673-1678. 

[^Authorities. — As before. Mr. Christie's "Life of Shaftesbury," a defense, and 
in some respects a successful defense, of that statesman's career, throws a fresli light 
on the policy of the Whig party during this period.] 



The one man in England on whom the discovery of the King's 
perfidy fell with the most crushing effect was the Chancellor, Lord 
Shaftesbury. Throughout his life Ashley Cooper had piqued him- 
self on a penetration which read the characters of men around him, 
and on a political instinct which discerned every coming change. 
His self-reliance was wonderful.* Li mere boyhood he saved his 
estate from the greed of his guardians by boldly appealing in per- 
son to Noy, who was then Attorney-General. As an undergrad- 
uate at Oxford he organized a rebellion of the freshmen against 
the oppressive customs which were enforced by the senior men of 
his college, and succeeded in abolishing them. At eighteen he 
was a member of the Short Parliament. On the outbreak of the 
Civil War he took part with the King ; but in the midst of the 
Royal successes he foresaw the ruin of the Royal cause, passed to 
the Parliament, attached himself to the fortunes of Cromwell, and 
became member of the Council of State. A temporary disgrace 
during the last years of the Protectorate only quickened him to a 
restless hatred which did much to bring about its fall. We have 
already seen his bitter invectives against the dead Protector, his 
intrigues with Monk, and the active part which he took, as mem- 
ber of the Council of State, in the King's recall. Charles reward- 
ed his services with a peerage, and with promotion to a foremost 
share in the Royal Councils, Ashley was then a man of forty, and 



IX.] 



TEE REVOLUTION. 



625 



under the Commonwealth he had been famous, in Dryden's con- 
temptuous phrase, as " the loudest bagpipe of the squeaking train;" 
but he was no sooner a minister of Charles than he flung himself 
into the debauchery of the Court with an ardor which surprised 
even his master. " You are the wickedest dog in England !" 
laughed Charles at some unscrupulous jest of his councillor. 
" Of a subject, sir, I believe I am !" was the unabashed reply. 
But the debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was, in 
fact, temperate by nature and habit, and his ill-health rendered 
any great excess impossible. Men soon found that the courtier 
who lounged in Lady Castlemaine's boudoir, or drank and jested 
with Sedley and Buckingham, was a diligent and able man of 
business. " He is a man," says the puzzled Pepys, three years 
after the Restoration, " of great business, and yet of pleasure and 
dissipation too." His rivals were as envious of the ease and 
mastery with which he dealt with questions of finance, as of the 
"nimble wit" which won the favor of the King. Even in later 
years his industry earned the grudging praise of his enemies. 
Drydeu owned that as Chancellor he was " swift to dispatch and 
easy of access," and wondered at the restless activity which " re- 
fused his age the needful hours of rest." His activity, indeed, was 
the more wonderful that his health Avas utterly broken. An acci- 
dent in early days left behind it an abiding weakness, whose traces 
were seen in the furrows which seared his long, pale face, in the 
feebleness of his health, and the nervous tremor which shook his 
puny frame. The " pigmy body " seemed " fretted to decay " by 
the "fiery soul" within it. But pain and weakness brought with 
them no sourness of spirit. Ashley was attacked more unscrupu- 
lously than any statesman save Walpole; but Burnet, who did not 
love him, owns that he was never bitter or angry in speaking of 
his assailants. Even the wit with which he crushed them was 
commonly good-humored, "When will yol^ have done preach- 
ing ?" a bishop murmured testily, as Shaftesbury was speaking in 
the House of Peers* " When I am a bishop, my lord !" was the 
laughing reply. 

As a statesman Ashley not only stood high among his contem- 
porai'ies from his wonderful readiness and industry, but he stood 
far above them in his scorn of personal profit. Even Dryden, 
while raking together every fault in the Chancellor, owns that his 
hands were clean. As a political leader his position was to mod- 
ern eyes odd enough. In religion he was at best a Deist, with 
some fanciful notions that " after death our souls lived in stars," 
and his life was that of a debauchee. But, Deist and debauchee 
as he was, he represented, as we have seen, the Presbyterian and 
Nonconformist party in the Ro3^al Council. He was the steady 
and vehement advocate of toleration, but his advocacy was based 
on purely political grounds. He saw that persecution would fail 
to bring back the Dissenters to the Church, and that the efibrt to 
recall them only left Protestants disunited and at the mercy of 
their enemies. But in the temper of England after the Restora- 
tion lie saw no hope of obtaining toleration save from the policy 



C26 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of the King. Wit, debauchery, rapidity in the dispatch of busi- 
ness, were all used to keep Charles firm in his plans of toleration, 
and to secure him as a friend in the struggle Avhich Ashley car- 
ried on against the intolerance of Clarendon. Charles, as we have 
seen, had his own game to play, and his own reasons for protect- 
ing Ashley during his vehement but fruitless struggle against the 
Test and Corporation Act, the Act of Uniformity, and the perse- 
cution of the dissidents. Fortune at last smiled on the unscrupu- 
lous ability with which he entangled Clarendon in the embarrass^ 
ments of the Dutch war of 1664, and took advantage of the alien- 
ation of the Parliament to insure his fall. Of the yet more un- 
scrupulous bargain which followed w^e have already spoken. Ash- 
ley bought, as he believed, the Declaration of Indulgence, the re- 
lease of the imprisoned Nonconformists, and freedom of worship 
for all dissidents, at the price of a consent to the second attack on 
Holland ; and he was looked on by the public at large as the min- 
ister most responsible both for the measures he advised and the 
measures he had nothing to do with. But while facing the gath- 
ering storm of unpopularity, Ashley learned in a moment of drunk- 
en confidence the secret of the King's religion. He owned to a 
friend " his trouble at the black cloud which was gathering over 
England ;" but, troubled as he was, he still believed himself strong 
enough to use Charles for his own purposes. His acceptance of 
the Chancellorship and of the Earldom of Shaftesbury, as well as 
his violent defense of the war on opening the Parliament, identi- 
fied him yet more with the Royal policy. It was at this moment, 
if we credit a statement of doubtful authority in itself, but which 
squares with the sudden change in his course, that he learned from 
Arlington the secret of the Treaty of Dover. Whether this were 
so, or whether suspicion, as in the people at large, deepened into 
certainty, Shaftesbury saw he had been duped. To the bitterness 
of such a discovery was added the bitterness of having aided in 
schemes which he abhorred. His change of policy was rapid and 
complete. He suddenly pressed for the withdrawal of the Decla- 
ration of Indulgence. Alone among his fellow-ministers he sup- 
ported the Test Act with extraordinary vehemence. His success 
in displacing James and Clifford, and in creating a barrier against 
any future Catholic projects, gave him hopes of revenging the de- 
ceit which had been practiced on him by forcing his policy on 
the King. For the moment, indeed, Charles was helpless. He 
found himself, as he had told Lewis long before, alone in his 
realm. The Test Act had been passed unanimously by both 
Houses. Even the Nonconformists deserted him, and preferred 
persecution to the support of his plans. The dismissal of the Cath- 
olic officers made the employment of force, if he ever contemplated 
it, impossible, while the ill success of the Dutch war robbed him 
of all hope of aid from France. The firmness of the Prince of 
Orange had at last roused the stubborn energy of his countrymen. 
The iB'rench conquests on land were slowly won back, and at sea 
the fleet of the allies was still held in check by the fine seaman- 
I ship of De Ruy ter. Nor was William less successful in diplomacy 



TX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



627 



than in war. The House of Austria was at last roused to action 
by the danger which threatened Europe, and its union with the 
United Provinces laid the foundation of the Grand Alliance. 
Shaftesbury resolved to put an end to the war ; and for this pur- 
pose he threw himself into hearty alliance with the Country party 
in the Commons, and welcomed the Duke of Ormond and Prince 
Rupert, who were looked upon as " great Parliament men," back 
to the Royal Council. It was to Shaftesbury's influence that 
Charles attributed the dislike w^hich the Commons displayed to 
the war, and their refusal of a grant of supplies for it until fresh 
religious securities were devised. It was at his instigation that 
an address was presented by both Houses against the plan of 
marrying James to a Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. But 
the projects of Shaftesbury were suddenly interrupted by an un- 
expected act of vigor on the part of the King. The Houses were 
no sooner prorogued in November than the Chancellor was or- 
dered to deliver up the Seals. 

"It is only laying down my gown and buckling on my sword," 
Shaftesbury is said to have replied to the Royal bidding ; and, 
though the words were innocent enough, for the sword was part 
of the usual dress of a gentleman, which he must necessarily re- 
sume when he laid aside the gown of the Chancellor, they Avere 
taken as conveying a covert threat. He was still determined to 
force on the King a j^eace with the States. But he looked for- 
ward to the dangers of the future with even greater anxiety than 
to those of the present. The Duke of York, the successor to the 
throne, had owned himself a Catholic, and almost every one agreed 
that securities for the national religion would be necessary in the 
case of his accession. But Shaftesbury saw, and it is his especial 
merit that he did see, that with a King like James, convinced of 
his divine right and bigoted in his religious fervor, securities were 
valueless. From the first he determined to force on Charles his 
brother's exclusion from the throne, and his resolve was justified 
by the Revolution, which finally did the work he proposed to do. 
Unhappily he was equally determined to fight Charles with weap- 
ons as vile as his own. The result of Clifford's resignation, of 
James's acknowledgment of his conversion, had been to destroy 
all belief in the honesty of public men, A panic of distrust had 
begun. The fatal truth was whispered that Charles himself was 
a Catholic. In spite of the Test Act, it was suspected that men 
Catholics in heart still held high office in the State, and we know 
that in Arlington's case the suspicion was just. Shaftesbury seized 
on this public alarm, stiiTed above all by a sense of inability to 
meet the secret dangers which day after day was disclosing, as the 
means of carrying out his plans. He began fanning the panic by 
tales of a Papist rising in London, and of a coming Irish revolt 
with a French army to back it. He retired to his house in the 
City to find security against a conspiracy which had been formed, 
he said, to cut his throat. Meanwhile he rapidly organized the 
Country party in the Parliament, and placed himself openly at its 
head. An address for the removal of ministers " popishly affected, 



G2S 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



01- otherwise obnoxious or dangerous," was presented on the reas- 
sembling of the Houses in 16*74, and the refusal of supplies made 
a continuance of the v/ar impossible. A bill Avas brought in to 
prevent all Catholics from approaching the Court — in other words, 
for removing James from the King's Councils. A far more im- 
portant bill M'as that of the Protestant Securities, which was press- 
ed by Shaftesbury, Halifax, and Carlisle, the leaders of the new 
Opposition in the House of Lords — a bill which enacted that any 
prince of the blood should forfeit his right to the Crown on his 
marriage with a Catholic. The bill, which was the first sketch 
of the later Exclusion Bill, failed to pass, but its failure left the 
Houses excited and alarmed. Shaftesbury was busy intriguing 
in the City, corresponding with William of Orange, and pressing 
for a war with France, which Charles could only avert by an ap- 
peal to Lewis, a subsidy from whom enabled him to prorogue the 
Parliament. But Charles saw that the time had come to give 
way. " Things have turned out ill," he said to Temple with a 
burst of unusual petulance ; " but had I been well served I might 
have made a good business of it." His concessions, however, were 
as usual complete. He dismissed Buckingham and Arlington. 
He made peace with the Dutch. But Charles was never more 
formidable than in the moment of defeat, and he had already re- 
solved on a new policy by which the eflbrts of Shaftesbury might 
be held at bay. Ever since the opening of his reign he had clung 
to a system of balance, had pitted Churchman against Noncon- 
formist, and Ashley against Clarendon, partly to preserve his own 
independence, and jDartly with a view of winning some advantage 
to the Catholics from the political strife. The temper of the Com- 
mons had enabled Clarendon to baffle the King's attempts ; and 
on his fall Charles felt strong enough to abandon the attempt to 
preserve a political balance, and had thrown himself on the sup- 
port of Lewis and the Nonconformists in his new designs. But 
the new policy broke down like the old. The Nonconformists re- 
fused to betray the cause of Protestantism, and Shaftesbury, their 
leader, was pressing on measures which would rob Catholicism of 
the hopes it had gained from the conversion of James. Li straits 
like these Charles resolved to win back the Commons by boldly 
adopting the policy on which the Plouse was set. The majority 
of its members were still a mass of Cavalier Churchmen, who re- 
garded Sir Thomas Osborne, a dependent of Ai'lington, as their 
representative in the Royal Councils. The King had already cre- 
ated Osborne Earl of Danby, and raised him to the post of Lord 
Treasurer in Clifford's room. In 1674 he frankly adopted the pol- 
icy of his party in the Parliament. 

The policy of Danby was simply that of Clarendon. He had 
all Clarendon's love of the Church, his equal hatred of Popery 
and Dissent, his high notions of the prei'Ogative tempered by a 
faith in Parliament and the law. The union between the Church 
and the Crown was ratified in a conference between Danby and 
the bishops at Lambeth ; and its first-fruits were seen in the rig- 
orous enforcement of the law against conventicles, and the exclu- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



629 



sion of all Catholics from Court. The Lady Mary, the eldest child 
of James, was confirmed by the King's orders as a Protestant, 
while the Parliament which was assembled iu 1675 was assured 
that the Test Act should be rigorously enforced. The change in 
the Poyal policy came not a moment too soon. As it was, the 
aid of the Cavalier party which rallied around Danby hardly saved 
the King from the humiliation of being forced to recall the troops 
he still maintained in the French service. To gain a majority on 
this point, Danby was forced to avail himself of a resource which 
from this time j)layed for nearly a hundred years an important 
part in English politics. He bribed lavishly. He was more suc- 
cessful in winning back the majority of the Commons from their 
alliance with the Country party by reviving the old spirit of re- 
ligious persecution. He proposed that the test which had been 
imposed by Clarendon on municipal officers should be extended 
to all functionaries of the State ; that every member of either 
House, every magistrate and public officer, should swear never to 
take arms against the King, or to " endeavor any alteration of the 
Protestant religion now established by law in the Church of En- 
gland, or any alteration in the government in Church and State 
as it is by law established." The bill was forced through the 
Lords by the bishoj)s and the Cavalier party, and its passage 
through the Commons was only averted by a quarrel on privilege 
between the two Houses which Shaftesbury dexterously fanned 
into flame. On the other hand, the Country party remained strong 
enough to refuse supplies. Eager as they were for the war with 
France which Dauby promised, the Commons could not trust the 
King ; and Danby was soon to discover how wise their distrust 
had been. For the Houses were no sooner prorogued than Charles 
revealed to him the negotiations he had been all the while carry- 
ing on with Lewis, and required him to sign a treaty by which, 
on consideration of a yearly pension guaranteed on the part of 
France, the two sovereigns bound themselves to enter into no en- 
gagements with other powers, and to lend each other aid in case 
of rebellion in their dominions. Such a treaty not only bound 
England to dependence on France, but freed the King from all 
Parliamentary control. But his minister pleaded in vain for de- 
lay and for the advice of the Council. Charles answered his en- 
treaties by signing the treaty with his own hand. Danby found 
himself duped by the King as Shaftesbury had found himself 
duped ; but his bold temper was only spurred to fresh plans for 
rescuing the King from his bondage to Lewis. To do this the 
first step was to reconcile the King and the Parliament, which 
met in 1676 after a prorogation of fifteen months. The Country 
party stood in the way of such a reconciliation, but Danby re- 
solved to break its strength by measures of unscrupulous vigor, 
for which a blunder of Shaftesbury gave an opportunity. Shaftes- 
bury despaired of bringing the House of Commons, elected as it 
had been fifteen years before in a moment of religious and polit- 
ical reaction, to any steady opposition to the Crown. He had al- 
ready moved an address for a dissolution ; and he now urged that 



630 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



as a statute of Edward the Third ordained that Parliaments should 
be held " once a year, or oftener if need be," the Parliament by 
the recent prorogation of a year and a half Ivad ceased legally to 
exist. The Triennial Act deprived such an argument of any force. 
But Danby represented it as a contempt of the House, and the 
Lords at his bidding committed its supporters, Shaftesbury, Buck- 
ingham, Salisbury, and Wharton, to the Tower, in 1677. While 
the Opposition cowered under the blow, Danby pushed on a meas- 
ure which was designed to win back alarmed Churchmen to con- 
fidence in the Crown. By the bill for the Security of the Church 
it was provided that on the succession of a king not a member of 
the Established Church the appointment of bishops should be 
vested in the existing prelates, and that the King's children should 
be placed in the guardianship of the Archbishop of Canterbury, 

The bill, however, failed in the Commons, and a grant of supply 
was only obtained by Danby's profuse bribery. The progress of 
the war abroad, indeed, was rousing panic in England faster than 
Danby could allay it. The successes of the French arms in Flan- 
ders, and a defeat of the Prince of Orange at Cassel, stirred the 
whole country to a cry for war. The House of Commons echoed 
the cry in an address to the Crown ; but Charles parried the blow 
by demanding a supply before the war was declared, and on the 
refusal of the still suspicious House prorogued the Parliament. 
Fresh and larger subsidies from France enabled him to continise 
this prorogation for seven months. But the silence of the Parlia- 
ment did little to silence the country; and Danby took advantage 
of the popular cry for war to press an energetic course of action 
on the King. In its will to check French aggression the Cavalier 
party was as earnest as the Puritan, and Danby aimed at redeem- 
ing his failure at home by uniting the Parliament through a vigor- 
ous policy abroad. As usual, Charles gave way. He was himself 
for the moment uneasy at the a-ppearance of the French on the 
Flemish coast, and he owned that " he could never live at ease with 
his subjects" if Flanders were abandoned. He allowed Danby, 
therefore, to press on both parties the necessity for mutual conces- 
sions, and to define the new attitude of England by a step which 
was to produce results far more momentous than any of which 
either Charles or his minister dreamed. The Prince of Orange Avas 
suddenly invited to England, and wedded to Mary, the eldest child 
of the Duke of York. As the King was childless, and James had 
no son, Mary was presumptive heiress of the Crown. The mar- 
riage therefore promised a close political union in the future with 
Holland, and a corresponding opposition to the ambition of France. 
With the country it was popular as a Protestant match, and as 
insuring a Protestant successor to James. Lewis was bitterly 
angered; he rejected the English propositions of peace, and again 
set his army in the field. Danby was ready to accept the chal- 
lenge, and the withdrawal of the English embassador from Paris 
was followed in 1678 by an assembly of the Parliament. A war- 
like speech from the throne was answered by a warlike address 
from the House, supplies Avere voted, and an army raised. But 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



631 



the actual declaration of war still failed to appear. While Danby 
threatened war, Charles was busy turning the threat to his own 
profit, and gaining time by prorogations for a series of base nego- 
tiations. At one stage he demanded from Lewis a fresh pension 
for the next three years as the price of his good offices with the 
Allies. Danby stooped to write the demand, and Charles added, 
" This letter is written by my order. — C. R." A force of three thou- 
sand English soldiers were landed at Ostend; but the Allies were 
already broken by their suspicions of the King's real policy, and 
Charles soon agreed for a fresh pension to recall the brigade. The 
bargain was hardly struck when Lewis withdrew the terras of 
peace he had himself offered, and on the faith of which England 
had ostensibly retired from the scene. Danby at once offered fresh 
aid to the Allies, but all faith in England was lost. One power 
after another gave way to the new French demands, and the virt- 
ual victory of Lewis was secured in July, 1678, by the Peace of 
Nimeguen. 

The Treaty of Nimeguen not only left France the arbiter of 
Europe, but it left Charles the master of a force of twenty thou- 
sand men levied for the war he refused to declare, and with nearly 
a million of French money in liis pocket. His course had roused 
into fresh life the old suspicions of his perfidj^, and of a secret plot 
with Lewis for the ruin of English freedom and of English religion. 
That there was such a plot we know ; and the hopes of the Catholic 
party mounted as fast as the panic of the Protestants. Coleman, 
the secretary of the Duchess of York, and a busy inti-iguei*, had 
gained sufficient knowledge of the real plans of the King and of 
his brother to induce him to beg for money from Lewis in the 
work of furthering them by intrigues in the Parliament. A pas- 
sage from his letter gives us a glimpse of the wild hopes which 
were stirring among the hotter Catholics of the time. " They had 
a mighty work on their hands," he wrote, "no less than the con- 
version of three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the utter subduing 
of a pestilent heresy which had so long domineered over a great 
part of the northern world. Success would give the greatest blow 
to the Protestant religion that it had received since its birth," 
The letter was secret ; but the hopes of the Catholics w^ere known, 
and the alarm grew fast. Meanwhile one of the vile impostors 
who are always thrown to the surface at times of great public agi- 
tation was ready to take advantage of the general alarm by the 
invention of a Popish plot. Titus Gates, a Baptist minister before 
the Restoration, a curate and navy chaplain after it, but left pen- 
niless by his infamous character, had sought bread in a conversion 
to Catholicism, and had been received into Jesuit houses at Valla- 
dolid and St. Omer. While he remained there, he learned the fact 
of a secret meeting of the Jesuits in London,- which was j^robably 
nothing but the usual congregation of the order. On his expulsion 
for misconduct, this single fact widened in his fertile brain into a 
plot for the subversion of Protestantism and the death of the King. 
His story was laid before Charles, and received with cool incredu- 
lity J but Oates made affidavit of its truth before a London magis- 



C32 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chaf. 



trate, Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, and at last managed to appear 
before the Council. He declared that he had been trusted with 
letters which disclosed the Jesuit plans. They Avere stirring re- 
bellion in Ireland ; in Scotland they disguised themselves as Cam- 
eronians ; in England their aim was to assassinate the King, and 
to leave the throne open to the Papist Duke of York, But no let- 
ters appeared to support these monstrous charges, and Gates would 
have been dismissed with contempt but for the seizure of Cole- 
man's correspondence. His letters gave a new color to the plot. 
Danby himself, conscious of the truth that there were designs 
which Charles dared not avow, was shaken in his rejection of the 
disclosures, and inclined to use them as weapons to check the King 
in his Catholic policy. But a more unscrupulous hand had already 
seized on the growing panic. Shaftesbury, released after a long 
imprisonment, and desperate of other courses, threw himself into 
the plot. " Let the Treasurer cry as loud as he pleases against 
Popery," he laughed, " I will cry a note louder." But no cry was 
needed to heighten the popular frenzy from the moment when Sir 
Edmondsbury Godfrej^the magistrate before Avhom Gates had laid 
his information, was found in a field near London with his sword 
run through his heart. His death was assumed to be murder, and 
the murder to be an attempt of the Jesuits to " stifle the plot." 
A solemn funeral added to public agitation ; and the two Houses 
named committees to investigate the charges made by Gates. 

Li this investigation Shaftesbury took the lead. Whatever his 
personal ambition may have been, his public aims in all that fol- 
lowed were wise and far-sighted. He aimed at forcing Charles to 
dissolve the Parliament and appeal again to the nation. He aimet^ 
at forcing on Charles a ministry which should break his depend- 
ence on France and give a constitutional turn to his policy. He 
saw that no guaranty would really avail to meet the danger of a 
Catholic sovereign, and he aimed at excluding James fi-om the 
throne. But in pursuing these aims he rested wholly on the plot. 
He fanned the popular panic by accepting without question some 
fresh depositions in which Gates charged five Catholic peers with 
part in the Jesuit conspiracy. The peers were sent to the Tower, 
and two thousand suspected persons were hurried to prison. A 
proclamation ordered every Catholic to leave London. The train- 
bands were called to arms, and patrols paraded through the streets, 
to guard against the Catholic rising which Gates declared to be at 
hand. Meanwhile Shaftesbury turned the panic to political ac- 
count by forcing through Parliament, against the fierce opposition 
of the Court party, a bill which excluded Catholics from a seat in 
either House. The exclusion remained in force for a century and 
a half; but it had really been aimed against the Duke of York, 
and Shaftesbury was defeated by a proviso which exempted James 
from the operation of the bill. The plot, too, which had been sup- 
ported for four months by the sole evidence of Gates, began to 
hang fire; but a promise of reward brought forward 'a villain, 
named Bedloe, with tales beside which those of Gates seemed tame. 
The two informers were now pressed forward by an infamous ri- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



valiy to stranger and stranger revelations. Bedloe swore to the 
existence of a plot for the landing of a Papist army and a gener- 
al massacre of the Protestants. Oates capped the revelations of 
Bedloe by charging the Queen herself, at the bar of the Lords, 
with knowledge of the plot to murder her husband. Monstrous as 
such charges were, they revived the waning frenzy of the people 
and of the two Houses. The peers under arrest were ordered to 
be impeached. A new proclamation enjoined the arrest of every 
Catholic in the realm. A series of judicial murders began with 
the trial and execution of Coleman which even now can only be 
remembered with horror. But the alarm must soon have worn 
out had it only been supported by perjury. What gave force to 
the false plot was the existence of a true one. Coleman's letters 
had won credit for the perjuries of Oates, and a fresh discovery 
now won credit for the perjuries of Bedloe. The English embas- 
sador at Paris, Edward Montagu, returned home on a quarrel with 
Dauby, obtained a seat in the House of Commons, and, in spite of 
the seizure of his papers, laid on the table of the House the dispatch 
which had been forwarded to Lewis, demanding payment of the 
King's services to France during the late negotiations. The House 
was thunderstruck ; for, strong as had been the general suspicion, 
the fact of the dependence of England on a foreign power had never 
before been jDroved. Danby's name was signed to the dispatch, 
and he was at once impeached on a charge of high-treason. But 
Shaftesbury was more eager to secure the election of a new Par- 
liament than to punish his rival, and Charles was resolved to pre- 
vent at any price a trial which could not fail to reveal the dis- 
graceful secret of his foreign policy. Charles was in fact at Sliaftes- 
bury's mercy, and the bargain for w^hich Shaftesbury had been 
playing had to be struck. The Earl agreed that the impeachment 
should be dropped, and the King promised that a new Parliament 
sliould be summoned and a new ministry called into office. 

Section V.— Shaftesbury. 1679—1682. 

\_Authorities. — As before. We may add for this period Earl Russell's Life of 
his ancestor, William, Lord Russell.] 



When the Parliament met in March, 1679, the King's pledge 
was redeemed by the dismissal of Danby from his post of Treas- 
urer and the constitution of a new ministry. Shaftesbury, as 
its most important member, became President of the Council. 
The chiefs of the Country party. Lord Russell and Lord Cav- 
endish, took their seats at the board with Lords Holies and Rob- 
erts, the older representatives of the Presbyterian party which 
had merged in the general Opposition. Savile, Lord Halifax, 
as_ yet known only as a keen and ingenious speaker, entered the 
ministr/ in the train of his own connection. Lord Shaftesbury, 
while Lord Essex and Lord Capel, two of the most popular 
among the Country leaders, went to the Treasury. The recall 



634 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of Sir William Temple, the negotiator of the Triple Alliance, 
from his embassy at the Hague to fill the post of Secretary of 
State, promised a foreign policy which would again place En- 
gland high among the European powers. Temple returned with 
a plan of administration which, fruitless as it directly proved, 
is of great importance as marking the silent change which was 
passing over the Constitution. Like many men of his time, he 
was equally alarmed at the power both of the Crown and of the 
Parliament. In moments of national excitement the power of 
the Houses seemed irresistible. They had overthrown Claren- 
don. They had overthrown Clifford and the Cabal. They had 
just overthrown Danby. But though they were strong enough 
in the end to punish ill government, they showed no poAver of se- 
curing good government or of permanently influencing the policy 
of the Crown. For nineteen years, in fact, with a Parliament al- 
ways sitting, Charles had had it all his own way. He had made 
war against the will of the nation, and he had refused to make 
war when the nation demanded it. While every Englishman 
hated France, he had made England a mere dependency of the 
French King. The remedy for this state of things, as it was aft- 
erward found, was a very simple one. By a change M'hich we 
shall have to trace, the Ministry has now become a Committee of 
State oflicers, named by the majority of the House of Commons 
from among the more prominent of its representatives in either 
House, whose object in accepting ofiice is to do the will of that 
majority. So long as the majority of the House of Commons 
itself represents the more powerful current of public opinion, it 
is clear that such an aiTangeraent makes government an accuratG 
reflection of the national will. But obvious as such a plan may 
seem to us, it had as yet occurred to no English statesman. Even 
to Temple the one remedy seemed to lie in the restoration of the 
Royal Council to its older powers. This body, composed as it 
was of the great officers of the Court, the Royal Treasurer and 
Secretaries, and a few nobles specially summoned to it by the 
sovereign, formed up to the close of Elizabeth's reign a sort of 
deliberative assembly to which the graver matters of public ad- 
ministration were commonly submitted by the Crown. A prac- 
tice, however, of previously submitting such measures to a smaller 
body of the more important councilors must always have existed ; 
and under James this secret committee, which was then known 
as the Cabala or Cabal, began almost wholly to supersede the 
Council itself In the large and balanced Council Avhich was 
formed after the Restoration all real power rested with the " Ca- 
bala " of Clarendon, Southampton, Ormond, Monk, and the two 
Secretaries ; and on Clarendon's fall these were succeeded by 
Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. By a 
mere coincidence the initials of the latter names formed the word 
" Cabal," which has ever since retained the sinister meaning 
their unpopularity gave to it. The effect of these smaller com- 
mittees had undoubtedly been to remove the check which the 
larger numbers and the more popular composition of the Royal 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



635 



Council laid upon the Crown. The unscrupulous projects which 
made the Cabal of Clifford and his fellows a by- word among 
Englishmen could never have been laid before a council of great 
peers and hereditary officers of State. To Temple, therefore, the 
organization of the Council seemed to furnish a check on mere 
personal government which Parliament was unable to supply. 
For this purpose the Cabala, or Cabinet, as it was now becom- 
ing the fashion to term the confidential committee of the Coun- 
cil, was abolished. The Council itself was restricted to thirty 
members, and their joint income was not to fall below £300,000, 
a sum little less than what was estimated as the income of the 
whole House of Commons. A body of great nobles and pro- 
prietors, not too numerous for secret deliberation, and wealthy 
enough to counterbalance either the Commons or the Crown, 
would form. Temple hoped, a barrier against the violence and 
aggression of the one power, and a check on the mere despotism 
of the other. 

The new Council and the new ministry gave fair hope of a wise 
and patriotic government. But the difficulties were still great. 
The nation was frenzied with suspicion and panic. The elections 
to the new Parliament had taken place amid a whirl of excite- 
ment which left no place for candidates of the Court ; and so un- 
manageable was the temper of the Commons that Shaftesbury 
was unable to carry out his part of the bargain with Charles. 
The Commons insisted on carrying the impeachment of Danby 
to the bar of the Lords. The appointment of the new ministry, 
indeed, was welcomed with a burst of general joy ; but the dis- 
banding of the army and the withdrawal of the Duke of York to 
Holland at the King's command failed to restore public confi- 
dence. At the bottom of the panic lay the dread of a Catholic 
successor to the throne, a dread which the after history of James 
fully justified. Shaftesbury was earnest for the exclusion of 
James, but as yet the majority of the Council shrank from the 
step, and supported a plan which Charles brought forward for 
restraining the powers of his successor. By this project the pre- 
sentation to Church livings was to be taken out of the new mon- 
arch's hands. The last Parliament of the preceding reign was 
to continue to sit; and the appointment of all councilors, judges, 
lord-lieutenants, and officers in the fleet was vested in the two 
Houses so long as a Catholic sovereign was on the throne. The 
extent of these provisions showed the pressure which Charles 
felt; but Shaftesbury was undoubtedly right in setting the plan 
aside as at once insufficient and impracticable. He continued 
to advocate the Exclusion in the Eoyal Council ; and a bill for 
depriving James of his right to the Crown, and for devolving it 
on the next Protestant in the line of succession, was introduced 
into the Commons by his adherents and passed the House by a 
large majority. It was known that Charles would use his in- 
fluence with the Peers for its rejection. The Earl therefore fell 
back on the tactics of Pyni. A bold Remonstrance was pre- 
pared in the Commons. The City of London was ready with an 



636 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



address to the two Houses in favor of the bill. All Charles could 
do was to gain time by the prorogation of the Parliament for a 
few months. 

But delay would have been useless had the Country party re- 
mained at one. The temper of the nation and of the House of 
Commons was so hotly pronounced in favor of the Exclusion of 
the Duke that union among the patriot ministers must in the 
end have secured it, and spared England the necessity for the 
Revolution of 1688. The wiser leaders among them, indeed, were 
already leaning to the very change which that Revolution brought 
about. If James were passed over, his daughter Mary, the wife 
of the Prince of Orange, stood next in the order of succession ; 
and the plan of Temple, Essex, and Halifax was to bring the Prince 
over to England during the prorogation, to introduce him into the 
Council, and to pave his way to the throne. Unhappily Shaftes- 
bury was contemplating a very different course. For reasons 
which still remain obscure, he distrusted the Prince of Orange. 
His desire for a more radical change may have been prompted by 
the maxim ascribed to him that " a bad title makes a good king." 
But, whatever were his motives, he had resolved to set aside the 
claim of both James and his children, and to place the Duke of 
Monmouth on the throne, Monmouth was the eldest of the King's 
bastards, a weak and worthless profligate in temper, but popular 
through his personal beauty and his rejDutation for bravery. He 
had just returned in triumph from suppressing a revolt which had 
broken out among the Scotch Covenanters in the western shires ; 
and the tale was at once set about of a secret marriage between 
the King and his mother, which would have made him lawful heiv 
to the throne. Shaftesbury almost openly espoused his cause. 
He pressed the King to give him the command of the Guards, 
which would have put the only military force in Monmouth's hands. 
Left all alone in this course by the opposition of his colleagues, 
the Earl threw himself more and more on the support of the Plot. 
The prosecution of its victims was pushed recklessly on. Three 
Catholics were hanged in London. Eight priests were put to 
death in the country. Pursuivants and informers spread terror 
through every Popish household. Shaftesbury counted on the re- 
assembling of the Parliament to bring all this terror to boar upon 
the King. But Charles had already seized on the breach which 
the Earl's policy had made in the ranks of the Country party. He 
saw that Shaftesbury was unsupported by any of his colleagues 
save Russell. To Temple, Essex, or Halifax it seemed possible to 
bring about the succession of Mary without any a iolent revolution ; 
but to set aside, not only the right of James, but the right of his 
Protestant children, was to insure a civil war. The influence, 
however, of Shaftesburj'- over the Commons promised a speedy 
recognition of Monmouth, and Temple could only meet this by 
advising Charles to dissolve the Parliament. 

Shaftesbury's anger vented itself in threats that the advisers of 
this dissolution should pay for it Avith their heads. The danger 
was brought home to them by a sudden illness of the King; 



IX.] 



TEE REVOLUTION. 



637 



and the prospect of ruin if Monmouth should succeed in his design 
drew the moderate party in the Council, whether they would or 
not, to the Duke of York, It was the alarm which Essex and Hal- 
ifax felt at the threats of Shaftesbury which made them advise 
the recall of James on the King's illness ; and though the Duke 
again withdrew to Edinburgh on his brother's recovery, the same 
ministers encouraged Charles to send Monmouth out of the coun- 
try and to dismiss Shaftesbury himself from the Council. The dis- 
missal was the signal for a struggle to whose danger Charles was 
far from blinding himself. What had saved him till now was his 
cynical courage. In the midst of the terror and panic of the Plot, 
men " wondered to see him quite cheerful amid such an intricacy 
of troubles," says the courtly lieresby, " but it Avas not in his nat- 
ure to think or perplex himself much about any thing." Even in 
the heat of the tumult which followed on Shaftesbuiy's dismissal, 
Charles was seen fishing and sauntering as usual in Windsor Park. 
But closer observers than Reresby saw beneath this veil of indolent 
unconcern a consciousness of new danger. "From this time," says 
Burnet, " his temper was observed to change very visibly." He 
became, in fact, " sullen and thoughtful ; he saw that he had to do 
with a strange sort of people, that could neither be managed nor 
frightened." But he faced the danger with his old unscrupulous 
coolness. He reopened secret negotiations with France. Lewis 
Avas as alarmed as Charles himself at the warlike temper of the 
nation, and as anxious to prevent the assembly of a Parliament ; 
but the terms on which he offered a subsidy were too humiliating 
even for the King's acceptance. The failure forced him to sum- 
mon a new Parliament ; and the terror, which Shaftesbury was 
busily feeding with new tales of massacre and invasion, returned 
members even more violent than the members of the House he had 
just dismissed. Even the Council shrank from the King's proposal 
to prorogue this Parliament at its first meeting in 1680, but Charles 
persisted. Alone as he stood, he was firm in his resolve to gain time, 
for time, as he saw, was working in his favor. The tide of public 
sympathy was beginning to turn. The perjury of Gates proved too 
much at last for the credulity of juries ; and the acquittal of four of 
his victims was a sign that the panic was beginning to ebb. A far 
stronger proof of this was seen in the immense efforts which Shaftes- 
bury made to maintain it. Fresh informers were brought for- 
ward to swear to a plot for the assassination of the Earl himself, 
and to the share of the Duke of York in the conspiracies of his fel- 
low Papists. A paper found in a meal-tub was produced as evi- 
dence of the new danger. Gigantic torch-light processions parad- 
ed the streets of London, and the effigy of the Pope was burned 
amid the wild outcry of a vast multitude. 

Acts of yet greater daring showed the lengths to which Shaftes- 
bury was now ready to go. " He had grown up amid the tu- 
mults of civil war, and, gray-headed as he was, the fire and vehe- 
mence of his early daj^s seemed to awake again in the singular reck- 
lessness with which he drove on the nation to a new struggle in 
arms. In 1680 he formed a committee for promoting agitation 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



throughout the country ; and the petitions which it drew up for 
the assembly of the Parliament were sent to every town and grand 
jury, and sent back again with thousands of signatures. Mon- 
mouth, in spite of the King's orders, returned at Shaftesbury's call 
to London ; and a daring pamphlet pointed him out as the na- 
tion's leader in the coming struggle against Popery and tyranny. 
So great was the alarm of the Council that the garrison in every 
fortress was held in readiness for instant war. But the danger was 
really over. The tide of opinion had fairh^ turned. Acquittal fol- 
lowed acquittal. A reaction of horror and remorse at the cruelty 
which had hurried victim after victim to the gallows succeeded to 
the pitiless frenzy which Shaftesbury had fanned into a flame. 
Anxious as the nation was for a Protestant sovereign, its sense of 
justice revolted against the wrong threatened to James's Protest- 
ant children ; and every gentleman in the realm felt insulted at the 
project of setting Mary aside to put the crown of England on the 
liead of a Royal bastard. The memory, too, of the Civil War was 
still fresh and keen, and the rumor of an outbreak of revolt rallied 
every loyalist around the King. The host of petitions which Shaftes- 
bury procured from the counties was answered by a counter host 
of addresses from thousands who declared their " abhorrence " 
of the plans against the Crown. The country was divided into 
two great factions of "petitioners " and " abhorrers," the germs of 
the two great parties of " Whigs " and " Tories " which have play- 
ed so prominent a jjart in our political history from the time of 
the Exclusion Bill. Charles at once took advantage of this turn of 
affairs. He recalled the Puke of York to the Court. He received 
the resignations of Russell and Cavendish, who alone in the Coun- 
cil still supported Shaftesbury's projects, " with all his heart." 
Shaftesbury met defiance with defiance. Followed by a crowd of 
his adherents, he attended before the Grand Jury of Middlesex, to 
present the Duke of York as a Catholic recusant, and the King's 
mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, as a national nuisance, while 
Monmouth returned to make a progress through the country, and 
won favor every where by his winning demeanor. Above all, 
Shaftesbury relied on the temper of the Commons, elected as they 
had been in the very heat of the panic and irritated by the long 
prorogation ; and the first act of the House on meeting in October 
was to vote that their care should be " to suppress Popery and pre- 
vent a Popish successor." Rumors of a Catholic plot in Ireland 
were hardly needed to push the Exclusion Bill through the Com- 
mons without a division ; and even the Council wavered before the 
resolute temper of their opponents. Temple and Essex both de- 
clared themselves in favor of the Exclusion. Of all the leaders of 
the Country party, only Lord Halifax now remained opposed to it, 
and his apposition simply aimed at securing its object by less vio- 
lent means. " My Lord Halifax is entirely in the interest of the 
Prince of Orange," the French embassador, Barillon, wrote to his 
master, " and what he seems to be doing for the Duke of York is 
really in order to make an opening for a compromise by which the 
Prince of Orange may benefit." But Charles eagerly seized on 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



639 



tliis fatal clisnnion in the only party which could effectively check 
]}is designs. He dismissed Essex and Temple, and backed by his 
personal inflnence the eloquence of Halifax in bringing about the 
rejection of the Exclusion Bill in the Lords. The same fate await- 
ed Shaftesbury's despairing efforts to pass a Bill of Divorce, wliich 
would have enabled Charles to put away his queen on the ground 
of barrenness, and by a fresh marriage to give a Protestant heir to 
the throne. 

Bold as the King's action had been, it rested for support simply 
on the change in public feeling, and this Shaftesbury resolved to 
check and turn by a great public impeachment which would revive 
and establish the general belief in the Plot. Lord Stafford, who 
from his age and rank was looked on as the leader of the Catholic 
party, had Iain a prisoner in the Tower since the first outburst of 
popular f renzj^ He was now solemnly impeached ; and his trial 
in December, 1680, mustered the whole force of informers to prove 
the truth of a Catholic conspiracy against the King and the realm. 
The evidence was worthless ; but the trial revived, as Shaftesbury 
had hoped, much of the old panic, and the condemnation of the 
prisoner by a majority of his peers was followed by his death on 
the scaffold. The blow produced its effect on all but Charles. 
Even Lord Sunderland, the ablest of the new ministers who had 
succeeded Temple and his friends, pressed the King to give way. 
Halifax, Avhile still firm against the Exclusion Bill, took advantage 
of the popular pressure to introduce a measure which would with 
less show of violence have as completely accomplished the ends of 
an exclusion as the bill itself — a measure which would have taken 
from James on his accession the right of veto on any bill passed 
by the two Houses, the right of negotiating with foreign states, or 
of appointing either civil or military officers save with the consent 
of Parliament. The plan was no doubt prompted by the Prince 
of Orange ; and the States of Holland supported it by pressing 
Charles to come to an accommodation with his subjects which 
would enable them to check the perpetual aggressions which 
France had been making on her neighbors since the Peace of Ni- 
meguen. But deserted as he was by his ministers, and even by his 
mistress, for the Duchess of Portsmouth had been cowed into sup- 
porting the exclusion by the threats of Shaftesbury, Charles was 
determined to resist every project whether of exclusion or limita- 
tion. On a refusal of supplies he dissolved the Parliament. The 
truth was that he had at last succeeded in procuring the aid of 
France. Without the knowledge of his ministers he had renewed 
his secret negotiations, had pledged himself to withdraw from alli- 
ance with all opponents of French yjolicy, and in return had been 
promised a subsidy, which recruited his Treasury and again render- 
ed him independent of Parliaments. With characteristic subtlety, 
however, he summoned, in Mai'ch, 1681, a new Parliament. The 
summons was a mere blind. The King's one aim was to frighten 
the country into reaction by the dread of civil strife ; and his sum- 
mons of the Parliament to Oxfoi'd was an appeal to the country 
against the disloyalty of the capital, and an adroit means of reviv- 

41 



640 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ing the memories of the Civil War. With the same end he order- 
ed his Guards to accompany him, on the pretext of anticipated 
disorder; and Shaftesbury, himself terrified at the projects of the 
Court, aided the King's designs by appearing with his followers in 
arms on the plea of self-protection. The violence of the Parlia- 
ment played yet more efi'ectually into the King's hands. Its mem- 
bers were the same as those who had been returned to the Parlia- 
ment he had just dissolved, and their temper was more vehement 
than ever. Their rejection of a new Limitation Bill brought for- 
ward by Halifax, which, while conceding to James the title of 
King, would have vested the actual functions of government in the 
Prince of Orange, alienated the more moderate and sensible of the 
Country party. Their attempt to revive the panic by impeaching 
an informer, Fitz-Harris, before the House of Lords in defiance oi' 
the constitutional rule which entitled him as a commoner to a trial 
by his peers in the course of common law, did still more to throw 
public opinion on the side of the Crown. Shaftesbury's course rest- 
ed wholly on the belief that the penury of the Treasury left Charles 
at his mercy, and that a refusal of supplies must wj'ing from 
the King his assent to the exclusion. But the gold of France had 
freed the King from his thraldom. He had used the Parliament 
simply to exhibit himself as a sovereign whose patience and con- 
ciliatory temper was rewarded with insult and violence ; and now 
that he saw his end accomplished, he suddenly dissolved the 
Houses in April, and appealed in a Koyal declaration to the jus- 
tice of the nation at large. 

The appeal was met by an almost universal burst of loyalty. 
The Church rallied to the King; his declaration was read from 
every pulpit; and the Universities solemnly decided that "no re- 
ligion, no law, no fault, no forfeiture " could avail to bar the sacred 
right of hereditary succession. The arrest of Shaftesbury on a 
charge of suborning false witnesses to the Plot marked the new 
strength of the Crown. London, indeed, was still true to him; 
the Middlesex Grand Jury ignored the bill of his indictment ; and 
his discharge from the Tower was welcomed in every street with 
bonfires and ringing of bells. But a fresh impulse was given to 
the loyal enthusiasm of the country at large by the publication 
of a plan found among his papers — the plan of a secret association 
for the furtherance of the exclusion, whose members bound them- 
selves to obey the orders of Parliament even after its prorogation 
or dissolution by the Crown. Charles pushed boldly on in his 
new course. He confirmed the loyalty of the Church by renewing 
the persecution of the Nonconformists. The Duke of York return- 
ed in triumph to St. James's, and the turn of the tide was so mani- 
fest that Lord Sunderland and the ministers, who had vravered 
till now, openly sought the Duke's favor. Monmouth, who had 
resumed his progresses through the country as a means of check- 
ing the tide of reaction, was at once arrested. A daring breach 
of custom placed Tories in 1082 as sherifis of the City of Lon- 
don, and the packed juries they nominated left the life of every 
exclusionist at the mercy of the Crown. Shaftesbury, alive to the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



C41 



new danger, plunged desperately into conspiracies with a handful 
of adventurers as desperate as himself, hid himself in the Citj'', 
where he boasted that ten thousand "brisk boys" were ready to 
appear at his call, and urged his friends to rise in arms. But their 
delays drove him to flight ; and in January, 1683, two months aft- 
er his arrival in Holland, the soul of the great leader — great fi'om 
his immense energy and the wonderful versatility of his genius, 
but whose genius and energy had ended in wrecking for the time 
the fortunes of English freedom and in associating the noblest of 
causes with the vilest of crimes — found its first quiet in death. 

Section VI.— The Second Stuart Tyranny. 1683—1688. 

\_Aut.lioriti,es. — To those foi* the previous sections we may add Welwood's "Me- 
moirs," Lnttrell's "Diary," and above all Lord Macaiilay's "History of England" 
during this period.] 



Tlie flight of Shaftesbury proclaimed the triumph of the King. 
His wonderful sagacity had told him when the struggle was over 
and further resistance useless. But the Whig leaders, who had 
delayed to answer the Earl's call, still nursed projects of rising in 
arms; and the more desperate spirits who had clustered around 
him as he lay hidden in the City took refuge in plots of assassina- 
tion, and in a plan for murdering Charles and his brother as they 
passed the Rye-house on their road from London to IsTewraarket. 
Both the conspiracies were betrayed, and, though they were wholly 
distinct from one another, the cruel ingenuity of the Crown lawyers 
blended them into one. Lord Essex, the last of an ill-fated race, 
saved himself from a traitor's death by suicide in the Tower. 
Lord Russell, convicted on a charge of sharing in the Rye-house 
Plot, was beheaded in Lincoln Inn Fields. The same fate awaited 
Algernon Sidney. Monmouth fled in terror over-sea, and his flight 
was followed by a series of prosecutions for sedition directed 
against his followers. Li 1683 the Constitutional opposition 
which had held Charles so long in check lay crushed at his feet. 
A weaker man might easily have been led into a wild tyranny by 
the mad outburst of loyalty which greeted his triumph. On the 
very day when the crowd around Russell's scaffold were dipping 
their handkerchiefs in his blood, as in the blood of a martyr, the 
University of Oxford solemnly declared that the doctrine of pas- 
sive obedience, even to the worst of rulers, was a part of religion. 
But Charles saw that immense obstacles still lay in the road of a 
mere tyranny. The Church was as powerful as ever, and the men- 
tion of a renewal of the Lidulgence to Nonconformists had to be 
withdrawn before the opposition of the bishops. He was careful, 
therefore, during the few years which remained to him to avoid 
the appearance of any open violation of public law. He suspend- 
ed no statute. He imposed no tax by Royal authoritj^ He gen- 
erally enforced the Test Act. Nothing, indeed, shows more com- 
pletely how great a work the Long Parliament had done than a 
survey of the reign of Charles the Second. "The King," Hallam 



642 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



says very truly, " was restored to nothing but what the law had 
preserved to him." No attempt was made to restore the abuses 
which the patriots of 1C41 had swept away. Parliament was con- 
tinually summoned. In spite of its frequent refusal of supplies, 
no attemjit was ever made to raise money by unconstitutional 
means. The few illegal proclamations issued under Clarendon 
ceased with his fall. No etlbrt was made to revive the Star- 
Chamber and the Court of High Commission; and if judges were 
servile and juries sometimes packed, there was no open interference 
with the course of justice. In two remarkable points freedom had 
made an advance even on 1641. From the moment when printing 
began to tell on public opinion, it had been gagged by a system 
of licenses. The regulations framed under Henry the Eighth sub- 
jected the press to the control of the Star-Chamber, and the Mar- 
tin Marprelate libels brought about a yet more stringent control 
under Elizabeth. Even the Long Parliament laid a heavy hand 
on tlie press, and the great remonstrance of Milton in his "Areo- 
pagitica " fell dead on the ears of his Puritan associates. But the 
statute for the I'egulation of printing which was passed immediate- 
ly after the Restoration expired finally in 1679, and the temper 
of the Parliament gave no hope of any successful attempt to re- 
establish the censorship. To the fi'eedom of the press the Habeas 
Corpus Act added a new security for the personal freedom of ev- 
ery Englishman. Against arbitrary imprisonment provision had 
been made in the earliest ages by a fomous clause in the Great 
Charter. No free man could be held in prison save on charge or 
conviction of crime or for debt ; and every prisoner on a criminal 
charge could demand as a right from the court of King's Bencli 
the issue of a writ of "habeas corpus," wliich bound his jailer to 
produce both the prisoner and the Avarrant on which he was im- 
prisoned, that the court might judge whether he were imprisoned 
according to law. In cases, however, of imprisonment on a war- 
rant of the Royal Council, it had been sometimes held by judges 
that the writ could not be issued, and under Clarendon's adminis- 
tration instances had in this way occurred of imprisonment without 
legal remedy. But his fall was quickly followed by the introduc- 
tion of a bill to secure this right of the subject, and after a long 
struggle the Act which is known as the Habeas Corpus Act passed 
finally in 1679. By this great statute the old practice of the law 
was freed from all difficulties and exceptions. Every prisoner 
committed for any crime save treason or felony was declared en- 
titled to his writ even in the vacations of the courts, and heavy 
penalties were enforced on judges or jailers who refused him this 
right. Every person committed for felony or treason was entitled 
to be released on bail, unless indicted at the next session of jail 
delivery after his commitment, and to be discharged if not indict- 
ed at the sessions which followed. It was forbidden under the 
heaviest penalties to send a prisoner into any places or fortresses 
beyond the seas. 

Galling to the Crown as the freedom of the press and the Ha- 
beas Corpus Act were soon found to be, Charles made no attempt 



IX.3 



THE REVOLUTION. 



643 



to curtail the one or to infringe the other. But while cautious to 
aA'oid rousing popular resistance, ho moved coolly and resolutely 
forward on the path of despotism. It was in vain that Halifax 
pressed for energetic resistance to the aggressions of France, for 
the recall of Monmouth, or for the calling of a fresh Parliament. 
Like every other English statesman he found he had been duped, 
and that now his work was done he was suffered to remain in of- 
fice, but left without any influence in the government. In spite 
of his remonstrances the Test Act Avas violated by the readmission 
of James to a seat in the Council, and by his restoration to the of- 
fice of Lord High Admiral. Parliament, in defiance of the Trien- 
nial Act, remained unassembled during the remainder of the King's 
reign. His secret alliance with France furnished Charles with the 
funds he immediately required, and the rapid growth of the cus- 
toms through the increase of English commerce promised to give 
him a revenue which, if peace were preserved, would save him from 
the need of a fresh appeal to the Commons. All opposition was 
at an end. The strength of the Country party had been broken 
by the reaction against Shaftesbury's projects, and by the flight 
and death of its more prominent leaders. Whatever strength it 
retained lay chiefly in tlie towns, and these were now attacked by 
writs of" quo warranto," which called on them to show cause why 
their charters should not be declared forfeited on the ground of 
abuse of their privileges. A few verdicts on the side of the Crown 
brought about a general surrender of municipal liberties; and the 
grant of fresh charters, in which all but ultra-loyalists were care- 
fully excluded from their corporations, placed the representation 
of the boroughs in the hands of the Crown. Against active dis- 
content Charles had long been quietly providing by the gradual 
increase of his Guards. The withdrawal of its garrison from Tan- 
gier enabled him to raise their force to nine thousand well-equipped 
soldiers, and to supplement this force, the nucleus of our present 
standing army, by a reserve of six regiments,- which were main- 
tained, till they should be needed at home, in the service of the 
United Provinces. But great as the danger really was, it lay not 
so much in isolated acts of tyranny as in the character and purpose 
of Charles himself His dqath at the very moment of his triumph 
saved English freedom. He had regained his old popularity, and 
at the news of his danger in the spring of 1685 crowds thronged 
the churches, praying that God would raise him up again to be a 
father to his people. The bishops around his bed fell on their 
knees and implored his blessing, and Charles with outstretched 
hands solemnly gave it to them. But while his subjects were 
praying, and his bishops seeking a blessing, the one anxiety of the 
King was to die reconciled to the Catholic Church. When his 
chamber was cleared, a priest named Huddleston, who had saved 
his life after the battle of Worcester, received his confession and 
administered the last sacraments. Charles died as he had lived : 
brave, witty, cynical, even in the presence of death. Tortured as 
he was with pain, he begged the by-standers to forgive him for be- 
ing so unconscionable a time in dying. One mistress, the Duchess 



644 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of Portsmoutbjhung weeping over his bed. His last thought was 
of another mistress, Nell Gwynn. "Do not," he whispered to his 
successor ere he sank into a fatal stupor — " do not let poor Nelly 
starve !" 

The first words of James on his accession in February, 1685, 
were a pledge to preserve the laws inviolate and to protect the 
Church. The pledge was welcomed by the whole country with 
enthusiasm. All the suspicious of a Catholic sovereign seemed to 
have disappeared. " We have the word of a King !" ran the gen- 
eral cry, " and of a King who was never worse than his word." 
The conviction of his brother's faithlessness stood James in good 
stead. He was looked upon as narrow, impetuous, stubborn, and 
despotic in heart, but even his enemies did not accuse him of be- 
ing false. Above all, he was believed to be keenly alive to the 
honor of his country, and resolute to free it from foreign depend- 
ence. It was necessary to summon a Parliament, for the Royal 
revenue ceased with the death of the King ; but the elections, 
swayed at once by the tide of loyalty and by the command of the 
boroughs which the surrender of their charters had given to the 
Crown, sent up a House of Commons in which James failed to find 
a man who was not to his mind. The question of religious securi- 
ty-was waived at a hint of the Royal displeasure. A revenue of 
nearly two millions was granted to tlie King for life. All that 
was wanted to rouse the loyalty of the country into fanaticism 
was supplied by a rebellion in the north, and by another under 
Monmouth in the west. The hopes of Scotch freedom had clung 
ever since the Restoration to the house of Argyle. The great 
Marquis, as we have seen, had been brought to the block at the 
Restoration. His son, the Earl of Argyle, had been unable to save 
himself, even by a life of singular caution and obedience, from the 
ill-will of the vile politicians who governed Scotland. He was at 
last convicted of treason on grounds at which every English states- 
man stood aghast. "We should not hang a dog here," Halifax 
protested," on the grounds on which my Lord Argyle has been sen- 
tenced to death." The Earl escaped, however, to Holland, and 
lived peaceably there during the six last years of the reign of 
Charles. Monmouth found the same refuge at the Hague, where 
a belief in his father's love and purpose to recall him secured him 
a kindly reception from William of Orange. But the accession of 
James was a death-blow to the hopes of the Duke, while it stirred 
the fanaticism of Argyle to a resolve of wresting Scotland from 
the rule of a Popish king. The two leaders determined to appear 
in arms in England and the North, and the two expeditions sailed 
within a few days of each other. Argyle's attempt was soon over. 
His clan of the Campbells rose on his landing in Cantyre, but the 
country had been occupied for the King, and quarrels among the 
exiles who accompanied him robbed his effort of every chance of 
success. His force scattered without a fight; and Argyle, arrested 
in an attempt to escape, was hurried to a traitor's death. Mon- 
mouth for a time found brighter fortune. His popularity in the 
west was great, and, though the gentry held aloof when he landed 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



645 



at Lyme, the farmers and traders of Devonshire and Dorset flocked 
to his standard. The clothier-towns of Somerset were still true to 
the Whig cause, and on the entrance of the Duke into Taunton the 
popular enthusiasm showed itself in flowers which wreathed every 
door, as well as in a train of young girls who presented Monmouth 
with a Bible and a flag. His forces now amounted to six thousand 
men, but whatever chance of success he might have had was lost 
by his assumption of the title of King. The gentry, still true to 
the cause of Mary and of William, held stubbornly aloof, while the 
Guards hurried to the scene of the revolt, and the militia gathered 
to the Royal standard. Foiled in an attempt on Bristol and Bath, 
Monmouth fell back on Bridgewater, and flung himself in the night 
of the sixth of July, 1685, on the King's forces, which lay encamped 
on Sedgemoor. The surprise failed ; and the brave peasants and 
miners who followed the Duke, checked in their advance by a deep 
drain which crossed the moor, were broken after a short resistance 
by the Royal horse. Their leader fled from the field, and, after a 
vain effort to escape from the realm, was captured and sent piti- 
lessly to the block. 

Never had England shown a firmer loyalty, but its loyalty was 
changed into horror by the terrible measures of repression which 
followed on the victory of Sedgemoor. Even North, the Lord 
Keeper, a servile tool of the Crown, protested against the license 
and bloodshed in which the troops were suffered to indulge after 
the battle. His protest, however, was disregarded, and he Avith- 
drew broken-hearted from the Court to die. James was, in fact, 
resolved on a far more terrible vengeance ; and the Chief-Justice 
Jeffreys, a man of great natural powers but of violent temper, was 
sent to earn the Seals by a series of judicial murders which have 
left his name a by-word for cruelty. Three hundred and fifty 
rebels were hanged in the "Bloody Circuit" as Jeffreys made his 
way through Dorset and Somerset. More than eight hundred 
were sold into slavery beyond sea. A yet larger number were 
whipped and imprisoned. The Queen, the maids of honor, the 
courtiers, even the Judge himself, made shameless profit from the 
sale of pardons. What roused pity above all were the cruelties 
wreaked upon women. Some were scourged from market-town to 
market-town. Mrs. JJsle, the wife of one of the Regicides, was 
sent to the block at Winchester for harboring a rebel. Elizabeth 
Gaunt, for the same act of womanly charity, was burned at Tyburn. 
Pity turned into horror Avhen it was found that cruelty such as 
this was avowed and sanctioned by the King. Even the cold 
heart of General Churchill, to whose energy the victory at Sedge- 
moor had mainly been owing, revolted at the ruthlessness with 
which James turned away Irom all appeals for mercy. "This 
marble," he cried, as he struck the chimney-piece on which he 
leaned, "is not harder than the King's heart." But it was soon 
plain that the terror which the butchery was meant to strike into 
the people was part of a larger purpose. The revolt was made a 
l)retext for a vast increase of the standing array. Chai'les, as we 
liave seen, had silently and cautiously raised it to nearly ten thou- 



646 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



sand men ; James raised it at one swoop to twenty thousand. The 
employment of this force was to be at home, not abroad, for the 
hope of an English policj'- in foreign aftairs had ah-eady faded 
away. In the design which James had at iieart he could look 
for no consent from Parliament ; and, however his pride revolted 
against a dependence on France, it was only by French gold and 
French soldiers that he could hope to hold the Parliament perma- 
nently at bay. A week, therefore, after his accession he assured 
Lewis that his gratitude and devotion to him equaled that of 
Charles himself. " Tell your master," he said to the French em- 
bassador, " that without his protection I can do nothing. He has 
a right to be consulted, and it is my wish to consult him about 
every thing." The pledge of subservience was rewarded with the 
promise of a subsidy, and the promise was received with expres- 
sions of delight and servility which Charles would have mocked at. 
Never had the secret league with France seemed so full of dan- 
ger to English religion. Europe had long been trembling at the 
ambition of Lewis ; it was trembling now at his bigotry. He had 
proclaimed warfare against civil liberty in his attack upon Hol- 
land ; he declared war at this moment upon religious freedom by 
revoking the Edict of Nantes, the measure by which Henry the 
Fourth, after his abandonment of Protestantism, secured toleration 
and the free exercise of their worship for his Protestant subjects. 
It had been respected by Richelieu even in his victory over the 
Huguenots, and only lightly tampered with by Mazarin. But from 
the beginning of his reign Lewis had resolved to set aside its pro- 
visions, and his revocation of it in 1685 was only the natural close 
of a progressive system of persecution. The revocation was fol- 
lowed by outrages more cruel than even the bloodshed of Alva. 
Dragoons were quartered on Protestant families, women were flung 
from their sick-beds into the streets, children were torn from tlieir 
motliers' arms to be brought up in Catholicism, ministers were sent 
to the galleys. In spite of the royal edicts, which forbade even , 
flight to the victims of these horrible atrocities, a hundred thou- 
sand Protestants fled over the borders, and Holland, Switzerland, 
the Palatinate, were tilled with French exiles. Thousands found 
I'efuge in England, and their industry founded in the fields east of 
London the silk trade of Spitalfields, But while Englishmen were 
quivering with horror at the news from France, James, in defiance 
of the law, was filling his new army with Catholic ofticers. He 
dismissed Halifax on his refusal to consent to a plan for repealing 
the Test Act, and met the Parliament in 1686 with a haughty 
declaration that, whether legal or not, his grant of commissions to 
Catholics must not be questioned, and a demand of supplies for his 
new troops. Loyal as was the temper of the Houses, their alarm 
at Popery and at a standing array was yet stronger than their loy- 
alty. The Commons, by the majority of a single vote, deferred 
the grant of supplies till grievances were redressed, and demanded 
in their address the recall of the illegal commissions. The Lords 
took a bolder tone ; and the protest of the bishops against any iuc;, 
fringement of the Test Act was backed by the eloquence of Hali- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



647 



fax. But both Houses were at once prorogued. The King re- 
solved to obtain from the judges what he could not obtain from 
Parliament. He remodeled the bench by dismissing four judges 
who refused to lend themselves to his plans ; and their successoi's 
decided in the case of Sir Edward Hales, a Catholic officer in the 
Royal army, that a Royal dispensation could be pleaded in bar of 
the Test Act. The principle laid down by the judges asserted the 
light of the Crown to override the laws, and it was applied by 
James with a reckless impatience of all decency and self-restraint. 
Catholics were admitted into civil and military offices Avithout 
stint, and four Roman Catholic peers were sworn as members of 
the Privy Council. The laws which forbade the presence of Cath- 
olic priests in the realm, or the open exercise of Catholic worship, 
were set at naught. A gorgeous chapel was opened in the Palace 
of St. James for the worship of the King. Carmelites, Benedic- 
tines, Franciscans, appeared in their religious garb in the streets 
of London, and the Jesuits set up a crowded school in the Savoy. 
The quick growth of discontent at these acts would have start- 
led a wiser man into prudence, but James prided himself on the 
reckless violence of his procedure. A riot which took place on the 
opening of a fresh Catholic chapel in the City was followed by the 
establishment of a camp of thirteen thousand men at Hounslowto 
overawe the capital. The course which James intended to follow 
in England Avas shown by the course he was following in the sister 
kingdoms. In Scotland he acted as a pure despot. He placed its 
government in the hands of two lords, Melfort and Perth, who had 
embraced his own religion, and put a Catholic in command of the 
Castle of Edinburgh. Under Charles the Scotch Parliament had 
been the mere creature of the Crown ; but, servile as Avere its 
members, there was a point at which their servility stopped. When 
James boldly required from them the toleration of Catholics, they 
refused to pass such an Act. It was in vain that the King tempt- 
ed them to consent by the offer of a free trade Avith England. 
" Shall Ave sell our God ?" Avas the indignant reply. James at once 
ordered the Scotch judges to treat all laws against Catholics as 
null and void, and his orders Avere obeyed. In Ireland his policy 
threw off even the disguise of law. Papists Avere admitted by the 
King's command to the Council and to civil offices. A Catholic, 
Lord Tyrconnell, was put at the head of the army, and set instant- 
ly about its reorganization by cashiering Protestant officers and 
by admitting two thousand Catholic natives into its ranks. Mean- 
while James had begun in England a bold and systematic attack 
upon the Church. He regarded his ecclesiastical supremacy as a 
Aveapon providentially left to him for undoing the Avork Avhich it 
had enabled his predecessors to do. Under Henry and Elizabeth 
it had been used to turn the Church of England from Catholic to 
Protestant ; under James it should be used to turn it back again 
from Protestant to Catholic. The High Commission, indeed,"had 
been declared illegal by an Act of the Long Parliament, and this 
Act had been confirmed by the Parliament of the Restoration ; but 
the statute Avas roughly set aside. Seven Commissioners were ap- 



648 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



pointed in 1686 for the government of the Chui-ch, with Jeffreys at 
their head ; and the first blow of the Commission was at the Bish- 
op of London. James had forbidden the clergy to preach against 
Popery, and ordered Bishop Compton to suspend a London vicar 
who set this order at defiance. The Bishop's refusal was jDunished 
by his own suspension. But the pressure of the Commission only 
drove the clergy to a bolder defiance of the Royal will. Sermons 
against sujjerstition were preached from every pulpit ; and the two 
most famous divines of the day, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, put 
themselves at the head of a host of controversialists,who scattei-ed 
pamphlets and tracts from every printing-press. 

Foiled in his direct efforts to overawe the Church, James re- 
solved to attack it in the great institutions which had till now 
been its stronghold. To secure the Universities for Catholicism 
was to seize the only training-schools which the clergy possessed. 
Cambridge indeed escaped easily. A Benedictine monk who pre- 
sented himself with Royal letters recommending him for the de- 
gree of a master of arts was rejected on his refusal to sign the Ar- 
ticles ; and the Yice-Chancellor paid for the rejection by dismissal 
from his oflice. But a far more violent and obstinate attack was 
directed against Oxford. The Master of University College, who 
declared himself a convert, Avas authorized to retain his post in 
defiance of the law, Massey, a Roman Catholic, M'as presented by 
the Crown to the Deanery of Christ Church, Magdalen Avas the 
wealthiest Oxford College, and James in 1687 recommended one 
Farmer, a Catholic of infamous life, and not even qualified by stat- 
ute for the ofiice, to its vacant headship. The Fellows remon- 
strated, and on the rejection of their remonstrance chose Hough„ 
one of their own number, as their President. The Commission de- 
clared the election void ; and James, shamed out of liis first can- 
didate, recommended a second, Parker, Bishop of Oxford, a Cath- 
olic in heart and the meanest of his courtiers. But the Fellows 
held stubbornly to their legal head. It was in vain that the King 
visited Oxford, summoned them to his presence, and rated them as 
they knelt before him like schoolboys. " I am King," he said ; " I 
will be obeyed ! Go to your chapel this instant, and elect the 
Bishop ! Let those who refuse look to it, for they shall feel the 
whole weight of my hand !" It was felt that to give Magdalen as 
well as Christ Church into Catholic hands was to turn Oxford into 
a Catholic seminary, and the King's threats were calmly disregard- 
ed. But they were soon carried out. A special Commission vis- 
ited the University, pronounced Hough an intruder, set aside his 
appeal to the law, burst open the door of his President's house to 
install Pai-ker in his place, and on their refusal to submit deprived 
the Fellows of their fellowships. The expulsion of the Fellows 
was followed on a like refusal by that of the Demies, Parker, who 
died immediately after his installation, was succeeded by a Roman 
Catholic bishop in partibus, Bonaventure Giffard, and twelve Cath- 
olics were admitted to fellowships in a single day. 

The work James was doing in the Church he was doing with 
as mad a recklessness in the State. Parliament, which had been 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



649 



kept silent by prorogation after prorogation, was finally dissolved; 
and the King was left without a check in his defiance of the law. 
It was in vain that the bulk of the Catholic gentry stood aloof 
and predicted the inevitable reaction his course must bring about, 
or that Rome itself counseled greater moderation. James was in- 
fatuated with the success of his enterprises. He resolved to show 
the world that even the closest ties of blood were as nothing to 
him if they conflicted with the demands of his faith. His mar- 
riage with Anne Hyde, the daughter of Clarendon, bound both the 
Chancellor's sons to his fortunes; and on his accession he had 
sent his elder brother-in-law, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, as Lord 
Lieutenant to Ireland, and raised the younger, Laurence, Earl of 
Rochester, to the post of Lord Treasurer. But Rochester was now 
told that the King could not safely intrust so great a charge to 
any one who did not share his sentiments on religion, and on his 
refusal to abandon his faith he was driven from office. His broth- 
er, Clarendon, shared his fall. A Catholic, Lord Bellasys, became 
First Lord of the Treasury, which was put into commission after 
Rochester's removal ; and another Catholic, Lord Arundell, became 
Lord Privy Seal. Petre, a Jesuit, was called to the Privy Coun- 
cil. The Nuncio of the Pope was received in state at Windsor. 
But even James could hardly fail to perceive the growth of public 
discontent. The great Tory nobles, if they were stanch for the 
Crown, were as resolute Englishnien in their hatred of mere tyr- 
anny as the Whigs themselves. James gave the Duke of Norfolk 
the sword of State to carry before him as he went to Mass. The 
Duke stopped at the chapel door. " Your father would have gone 
farther," said the King. "Your Majesty's father was the better 
man," replied the Duke, "and he would not have gone so far." 
The young Duke of Somerset was ordered to introduce the Nuncio 
into the Presence Chamber. "I am advised," he answered, "that 
I can not obey your Majesty without breaking the law." "Do 
you not know that I am above the law?" James asked angrily. 
" Your Majesty may be, but I am not," retorted the Duke. He 
was dismissed from his post ; but the spirit of resistance spread 
fost. In spite of the King's letters, the governors of the Charter 
House, who numbered among them some of the greatest English 
nobles, refused to admit a Catholic to the benefits of the founda- 
tion. The most devoted loyalists began to murmur when James 
demanded apostasy as a proof of their loyalty. He had soon, in 
fact, to abandon all hope of bringing the Church or the Tories over 
to his will. He turned, as Charles had turned, to the Noncon- 
formists, and published in 1687 a Declaration of Indulgence which 
annulled the penal laws against Nonconformists and Catholics 
alike, and abrogated every Act which imposed a test as a qualifi- 
cation for office in Church or State. The temptation to accept 
such an offer Avas great, for, since the fall of Shaftesbury, persecu- 
tion had fallen heavily on the Protestant dissidents, and we can 
liardly wonder that the Nonconformists wavered for a time. But 
the great body of them, and all the more venerable names among 
them, remained true to the cause of freedom. Baxter, Howe, 



650 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Bunyan, all refused an Indulgence which could only be purchased 
by the violent overthrow of the law. A mere handful of addresses 
could be procured by the utmost pressure, and it was soon plain 
that the attempt to divide the forces of Protestantism had utterly 
failed. 

The failure of his Declaration only spurred James to an attempt 
to procure a repeal of the Test Act from Parliament itself Bat 
no free Parliament could be brought, as he knew, to consent to its 
repeal. The Lords, indeed, could be swamped by lavish creations 
of new peers. " Your troop of horse," his minister. Lord Sunder- 
land, told Churchill, " shall be called up into the House of Lords." 
But it was a harder matter to secure a compliant House of Com- 
mons. The Lord Lieutenants were directed to bring about such 
a " regulation" of the governing body in boroughs as would insure 
the return of candidates pledged to the repeal of the Test, and to 
question every magistrate in their county as to his vote. Half of 
them at once refused, and a long list of great nobles — the Earls of 
Oxford, Shrewsbury, Dorset, Derby, Pembroke, Rutland, Aberga- 
venny, Thanet, Northampton, and Abingdon — were at once dis- 
missed from their Lord Lieutenancies. The justices when ques- 
tioned simply replied that they would vote according to their con- 
sciences, and send members to Pai'liament who would protect the 
Protestant religion. After repeated " regulations," it was found 
impossible to form a corporate body which would return repre- 
sentatives willing to comply with the Royal will. All thought 
of a Parliament had to be abandoned; and even the most bigoted 
courtiers counseled moderation at this proof of the stubborn op- 
position which James must prepare to encounter from the peers,' 
the gentry, and the trading classes. The clergy alone still hes- 
itated in any open act of resistance. Even the tyranny of the 
Commission and the attack on the Universities failed to rouse into 
open disaffection men who had been preaching Sunday after Sun- 
day the doctrine of passive obedience to the worst of kings. But 
James seemed resolved to rouse them. On the twenty-seventh of 
April, 1688, he issued a fresh Declaration of Lidulgence, and order- 
ed every clergyman to read it during divine service on two suc- 
cessive Sundays. Little time was given for deliberation, but little 
time was needed. The clergy refused almost to a man to be the 
instruments of their own humiliation. The Declaration was read 
in only four of the London churches, and in these the congregation 
flocked out of church at the first words of it. Nearly all of the 
country clergy refused to obey the Royal orders. The Bishops 
went with the rest of the clergy. A few days before the appoint- 
ed Sunday Archbishop Sancroft called his suffragans together, and 
the six Avho were able to appear at Lambeth signed a temperate 
protest to the King, in which they declined to publish an illegal 
Declaration. "It is a standard of rebellion," James exclaimed as 
the Primate pi-esented the paper; and the resistance of the clergy 
was no sooner announced to him than he determined to wreak his 
vengeance on the Prelates who had signed the protest. He or- 
dered the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to deprive them of their 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



651 



see*?, but in this matter even the Commissioners shrank from obey- 
ing nira. The Chancellor, Lord Jeffreys, advised a prosecution 
for libel as an easier mode of punishment ; and the Bishops, who 
refused to give bail, were committed on this charge to the Tower. 
They passed to their prison amid the shouts of a great multitude, 
the sentinels knelt for their blessing as they entered its gates, and 
the soldiers of the garrison drank their healths. So threatening 
was the temper of the nation that his ministers pressed James to 
give way. But his obstinacy grew with the danger. "Indul- 
gence," he said, "ruined my father;" and on June the 29th the 
Bishops appeared as criminals at the bar of the King's Bench. 
The jury had been packed, the judges were mere tools of the 
Crown, but judges and jury were alike overawed by the indigna- 
tion of the people at large. No sooner had the foreman of the 
jury uttered the words "Not guilty" than a roar of applause 
burst from the crowd, and horsemen spurred along every road to 
carry over the country the news of the acquittal. 

Section VII ,— IVilliam of Orange. 

\_AutJi irities. — As before.] 



Amid the tumult of the Plot and the Exclusion Bill the wiser 
among English statesmen had fixed their hopes steadily on the 
succession of Mary, the elder daughter and heiress of James. The 
tyranny of her father's reign made this succession the hope of the 
people at large. But to Europe the importance of the change, 
whenever it should come about, lay not so much in the succession 
of Mary as in the new power which such an event would give to 
her husband, William, Prince of Orange. We have come, in fact, 
to a moment when the struggle of England against the aggres- 
sion of its King blends with the larger struggle of Europe against 
the aggression of Lewis the Fourteenth, and it is only by a rapid 
glance at the political state of the Continent that we can under- 
stand the real nature and results of the Revolution which drove 
James from the throne. 

At this moment France was the dominant power in Christendom. 
The religious wars which began with the Reformation broke the 
strength of the nations around her. Spain was no longer able to 
fight the battle of Catholicism. The Peace of Westphalia, by the 
independence it gave to the German princes, and the jealousy it 
left alive between the Protestant and Catholic powers, destroyed 
the strength of the Empire. The German branch of the House of 
Austria, spent with the long struggle of the Thirty- Years' War, 
had enough to do in battling hard against the advance of the 
Turks from Hungary on Vienna. The victories of Gustavus and 
of the generals whom he formed had been deai'ly purchased by 
the exhaustion of Sweden. The United Provinces were as yet 
hardly regarded as a great power, and were trammeled by their 
contest with England for the empire of the seas. England, which 



652 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



under Cromwell promised for a moment to take the lead in Eu- 
rope, sank under Charles and James into a dependency of France. 
France alone profited by the general wreck. The wise policy of 
Henry the Fourth in securing religious peace by a toleration to 
the Protestants had undone the ill effects of its religious wars. 
The Huguenots were still numerous south of the Loire, bat the 
loss of their fortresses had turned their energies into the peaceful 
channels of industry and trade. Feudal disorder was roughly put 
down by Richelieu, and the policy by which he gathered all local 
power into the hands of the Crown, though fatal in the end to the 
real welfare of France, gave it for the moment an air of good gov- 
ernment and a command over its internal resources which no other 
country could boast. Its compact and fertile territory, the natu- 
ral activity and enterprise of its people, and the rapid growth of 
its commerce and of manufactures, were sources of natural wealtli 
which even its heavy taxation failed to check. In the latter half 
of the seventeenth century France was looked upon as the wealth- 
iest power in Europe. The yearly income of the French Crown 
was double that of England, and even Lewis the Fourteenth trust- 
ed as much to the credit of his treasury as to the glory of his 
arms. " After all," he said, when the fortunes of war began to 
turn against him, " it is the last sovereign which must win !" It 
was, in fact, this superiority in wealth which enabled France to set 
on foot forces such as had never been seen in Europe since the 
downfall of Rome. At the opening of the reign of Lewis the 
Fourteenth its army mustered a hundred thousand men. With 
the war against Holland it rose to nearly two hundred thousand. 
In the last struggle against the Grand Alliance there M'as a time 
when it counted nearly half a million of men in arms. ISTor was 
France content with these enormous land forces. Since the ruin 
of Spain the fleets of Holland and of England had alone disputed 
the empire of the seas. Under Richelieu and Mazarin France 
could hardly be looked upon as a naval power. But the early 
years of Lewis saw the creation of a navy of one hundred men-of- 
war, and the fleets of France soon held their own against England 
or the Dutch. 

Such a power would have been formidable at any time ; but it 
was doubly formidable when directed by statesmen who in knowl- 
edge and ability were without rivals in Europe. No diplomatist 
could compare with Lionne, no war minister with Louvois, no finan- 
cier Avith Colbert. Their young master, Lewis the Fourteenth, 
bigoted, narrow-minded, commonplace as he was — n-ithout personal 
honor or personal courage, without gratitude and without pit}^, in- 
sane in his pride, insatiable in his vanity, brutal in his selfishness — 
had still many of the qualities of a great ruler: industry, patience, 
quickness of resolve, firmness of purpose, a capacity for discerning- 
greatness and using it, an immense self-belief and self-confidence, 
and a temper utterly destitute indeed of real greatness, but with 
a dramatic turn for seeming to be great. As a politician Lewis 
had simply to reap the harvest Avhich the two great Cardinals who 
went before him had sown. Both had used to the profit of France 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



653 



the exhaustion and dissension which the Avars of religion had 
brought upon Europe. Richelieu turned the scale against the 
House of Austria by his alliance with Sweden, with the United 
Provinces, and with the Protestant princes of Germany ; and the 
two great treaties by*which Mazarin ended the Thirty-Years' War — 
the Treaty of Westphalia and the Treaty of the Pyrenees — left the 
Empire disorganized and Spain powerless. From that moment, 
indeed, Spain had sunk into a strange decrepitude. Robbed of the 
chief source of her wealth by the independence of Holland, weak- 
ened at home by the revolt of Portugal, her infantry annihilated 
by Conde in his victory of Rocroi, her fleet ruined by the Dutch, 
her best blood drained away to the Indies, the energies of her peo- 
ple destroyed by the suppression of all liberty, civil or religious, 
her intellectual life crushed by the Inquisition, her industry crip- 
pled by the expulsion of the Moors, by financial oppression, and by 
the folly of her colonial system, the kingdom which under Philip 
the Second had aimed at the empire of the world lay helpless and 
exhausted under Philip the Fourth. The aim of Lewis from 16C1, 
the year when he really became master of France, was to carry on 
the policy of his predecessors, and, above all, to complete the ruin 
of Spain. The conquest of the Spanish provinces in the Nether- 
lands would carry his border to the Scheldt. A more distant hope 
lay in the probable extinction of the Austrian line which now sat 
on the throne of Spain. By securing the succession to their throne 
for a French prince, not only Castile and Aragon, with the Spanish 
dependencies in Italy and the Netherlands, but the Spanish empire 
in the New World would be added to the dominions of France. 
Nothing could save Spain but a union of the European powers, 
and to prevent this union by his negotiations was a work at which 
Lewis toiled for years. The intervention of the Empire was pre- 
vented by a renewal of the old alliances between France and the less- 
er German princes. A league with the Turks gave Austria enough 
to do on her eastern border. The policy of Charles the Second 
bound England to inaction. Spain was at last completely isolat- 
ed, and the death of Philip the Fourth gave a pretense for war, of 
which Lewis availed himself in 1667. Flanders was occupied in 
two months. Franche-Comte was seized in seventeen days. But 
the suddenness and completeness of the French success awoke a 
general terror before which the King's skillful diplomacy gave 
way. Holland was roused to a sense of danger at home by the 
appearance of French arms on the Rhine. England awoke from 
her lethargy on the French seizure of the coast-towns of Flanders. 
Sweden joined the two Protestant powers in the Triple Alliance ; 
and the dread of a wider league forced Lewis to content himself 
with the southern half of Flanders, and the possession of a string 
of fortresses which practically left him master of the Netherlands. 
Lewis was maddened by the check. He not only hated the 
Dutch as Protestants and Republicans, but he saw in them an 
obstacle which had to be taken out of the way ere he could re- 
sume his attack on Spain. Four years were spent in preparations 
for a decisive blow at this new enemy. The French army was 



654 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



raised to a hundred and eighty thousand men. Colbert created a 
fleet which rivaled that of Holland in number and equipment. 
Sweden Avas again won over. England was again secured by the 
Treaty of Dover. Meanwhile Holland lay wrapped in a false secu- 
rity. The alliance with France had been its ti'^clitional policy, and 
it was especially dear to the party of the great merchant class 
which had mounted to power on the fall of the House of Orange. 
John de Witt, the leader of this party, though he had been forced 
to conclude the Triple Alliance by the advance of Lewis to the 
Rhine, still clung blindly to the friendship of France. His trust 
only broke down when the French army crossed the Dutch border 
in 1672, and the glare of its watch-fires was seen from the walls of 
Amsterdam. For the moment Holland lay crushed at the feet of 
Lewis, but the arrogance of the conqueror roused again the stub- 
born courage wliicli had wrung victory from Alva .ind worn out 
the pride of Philip the Second. The fall of De Witt raised the 
Orange party again to power, and called the Prince of Orange to 
the head of the Republic. Though the young Stadtholder had hard- 
ly reached manhood, his great qualities at once made themselves 
felt. His earlier life had schooled him in a wonderful self-control. 
He had been left fatherless and all but friendless in childhood, he 
had been bred among men who looked upon his very existence as 
a danger to the State, his words had been Avatched, his looks noted, 
his friends jealously withdi'awn. In such an atmosphere tlie boy 
grew up silent, war}^, self-contained, grave in temper, cold in de- 
meanor, blunt and even repulsive in address. He was weak and 
sickly from his cradle, and manhood brought with it an asthma 
and consumption which shook his frame with a constant cough; 
his face was sullen and bloodless, and scored wdth deep lines which 
told of ceaseless pain. But beneath this cold and sickly presence 
lay a fiery and commanding temper, an immovable courage, and a 
political ability of the highest order. William Avas a born states- 
man. Neglected as his education had been in other Avays, for he 
knew nothing of letters or of art, he had been carefully trained in 
politics by John de Witt ; and the wide knoAvledge with Avhich in 
ins first address to the States-General the young Stadtholder re- 
viewed the general state of Europe, the cool courage Avith Avhich 
he calculated the chances of the struggle, at ouce Avon him the 
trust of his countrymen. Their trust was soon rewarded. Hol- 
land Avas saved, and province after province won back from the 
arms of France by William's dauntless resolve. Like his great 
ancestor, William the Silent, he Avas a luckless commander, and no 
general had to bear more frequent defeats. But he profited by 
defeat as other men profit by victory. His bravery, indeed, was 
of that nobler cast which rises to its height in moments of ruin 
and disma5^ The coolness Avith which, boy-general as he was, he 
rallied his broken squadrons amid the rout of Seneff", and Avrested 
from Conde at the last the fruits of his victory, moved his veteran 
opponent to a generous admiration. It Avas in such moments, in- 
deed, that the real temper of the man broke through the A'eil of 
his usual reserve. A strange light flashed from his eyes as soon 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



655 



as he was under fire, and in the terror and confusion of defeat his 
manners took an ease and gayety that charmed every soldier around 
him. 

The political ability of William was seen in the skill with which 
he drew Spain and the Empire into a coalition against France. 
But France was still matchless in arms, and the effect of her vic- 
tories was seconded by the selfishness of the Allies, and above all 
by the treacherous diplomacy of Charles the Second. William 
was forced to consent in 1679 to the Treaty of Nimeguen, which 
left France dominant over Europe as she had never been before. 
Holland indeed was saved from the revenge of Lewis, but fresh 
spoils had been wrested from Spain, and Franche-Comte, which 
had been restored at the close of the former war, was retained at 
the end of this. Above all, France overawed Europe by the dar- 
ing and success with which she had faced, single-handed, the wide 
coalition against her. Her King's arrogance became unbounded. 
Lorraine was turned, into a subject state. Genoa Avas bombarded, 
and its Doge forced to seek pardon in the antechambers of Ver- 
sailles. The Pope was humiliated by the march of an army upon 
Rome to avenge a slight offered, to the French embassador. The 
Empire was outraged by a shameless seizure of Imperial fiefs in 
Elsass and elsewhere. The whole Protestant world was defied by 
the horrible cruelties which followed the Revocation of the Edict 
of Nantes. Li the mind of Lewis peace meant a series of outrages 
on the powers around him, but every outrage helped the cool and 
silent adversary who was looking on from the Hague to build up 
the Great Alliance of all Europe, from which alone he looked for 
any effectual check to the ambition of France. The experience of 
the last war had taught William that of such an alliance England 
must form a part ; and we have already seen how much English 
politics were influenced during the reign of Charles by the strug- 
gle between William and Lewis to secure English aid. A recon- 
ciliation of the King with his Parliament was an indispensable 
step toward freeing Charles from his dependence on France, and 
it was to such a reconciliation that William at first bent his efforts ; 
but he was foiled by the steadiness with which Charles clung to 
the power whose aid was needful to carry out the schemes which 
he was contemplating. In his leanings toward France, however, 
Charles stood uttei'ly alone. His most devoted ministers foiled 
their sovereign's efforts as far as they could. Even Arlington, 
Catholic as at heart he was, refused to look on while France made 
the Flemish coast its own, and dispatched Temple to frame the 
Triple Alliance which defeated its hopes. Danby was even more 
hostile to France, and in wresting from his master permission to 
offer William the hand of Mary he dealt Lewis what proved to be 
a fatal blow. James was without a son, and the marriage with 
Mary secured to William on his father-in-law's death the aid of 
England in his great enterprise. But it was impossible to wait 
for that event ; and though William used his new position to bring 
Charles around to a more patriotic policy, his efforts were still 
fruitless. The storm of the Popish Plot complicated his position. 

42 



Sec. VII. 

WiT.I.IAM OF 

Geange. 

William 

and 

Charles II. 



656 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



In the earlier stages of the Exclusion Bill, when the Parliament 
seemed resolved simply to pass over James and to seat Mary at 
once on the throne after her uncle's death, William stood apart 
from the struggle, doubtful of its issue, though prepared to accept 
the good luck if it came to him. The fatal error of Shaftesbury in 
advancing the claims of Monmouth forced him into activity. To 
preserve his wife's right of succession, with all the great issues 
which were to come of it, no other course was left than to adopt 
the cause of the Duke of York. In the crisis of the struggle, there- 
fore, William threw his whole weight on the side of James. The 
eloquence of Halifax secured the rejection of the Exclusion Bill, 
and Halifax (as we know now) was the mouthpiece of William. 

But while England was seething with the madness of the Pop- 
ish Plot and of the Royalist reaction, the great European struggle 
was drawing nearer and nearer. The patience of Germany Avas 
worn out, and in 1686 its princes bound themselves in the Treaty 
of Augsburg to resist further aggressions on the part of France. 
From that moment a fresh war became inevitable, and William 
watched the course of his father-in-law with redoubled anxiety. 
His efforts in England had utterly failed. James had renewed his 
brother's secret treaty with France, and plunged into a quarrel 
with his people which of itself would have prevented him from 
giving any aid in a struggle abroad. The Prince could only si- 
lently look on, with a desperate hope that James might yet be 
brought to a nobler policy. He refused all encouragement to the 
leading malcontents who were already calling on him to interfere 
in arms. On the other hand he declined to support the King in 
his schemes for the abolition of the Test. " You ask me," he said 
to his father-in-law, " to countenance an attack on my religion. 
That I can not do !" If he still cherished hopes to bring about a 
peace between the King and people which might enable him to 
enlist England in the Grand Alliance, they vanished in 1687 before 
the Declaration of Indulgence. In union with Mary he addressed 
a temperate protest against this measure to the King. But the 
discovery of the plans which James was now forming — plans 
which were intended to rob Mary of a part of her future domin- 
ions as well as to cripple forever the power of England — forced 
him at last into earnest action. The King felt strong enough to 
carry through his system of government during his own lifetime; 
but the protest of Mary and William left little doubt that the 
changes he had made would be overthrown at his death. He 
resolved, therefore (if we trust the statement of the French em- 
bassador), to place Ireland in such a position of independence that 
she might serve as a refuge for his Catholic subjects from any Prot- 
estant successor. Clarendon was succeeded in the charge of the 
island by the Catholic Lord Tyrconnell, and the new governor went 
roughly to work. Every Englishman was turned out of office. 
Every judge, every privy councilor, every mayor and alderman 
of a borough, was soon a Catholic and an Irishman. In a few 
months the English ascendency was overthrown, and the life and 
fortune of every English settler were at the mercy of the natives 



IX.J 



THE REVOLUTION. 



657 



on whom they had trampled since Cromwell's day. The Irish 
army, purged of its Protestant soldiers, was intrusted to Catho- 
lic officers, and the dread of another massacre spread panic through 
the island. Fifteen hundred Protestant families fled terror-stricken 
across the Channel. The rest of the Protestants gathered togeth- 
er and prepared for self-defense. William had a right on Mary's 
behalf to guard against such a plan of dismembering her inherit- 
ance ; and Dykvelt, who was dispatched as his embassador to En- 
gland, organized with wonderful ability the various elements of 
disaffection into a compact opposition. Danby and Bishop Comp- 
ton answered for the Church. The Nonconformists were won by 
a promise of toleration. A regular correspondence was established 
between the Prince and some of the great nobles. But William 
still shrank from the plan of an intervention in arms. General as 
the disafiecl^ion undoubtedly was, the position of James seemed to 
be secure. He counted on the aid of France. He had an army of 
twenty thousand men. Scotland, crushed by the failure of Ax- 
gyle's rising, could give no such aid as it gave to the Long Parlia- 
ment. Ireland was ready to rise for the Catholic cause, and to 
throw, if needed, its soldiers on the western coast. Above all, it 
was doubtful if in England itself disaffection would turn into act- 
ual rebellion. The " Bloody Assize " had left its terror on the 
Whigs. The Tories and the Churchmen, angered as they were, 
Avere still hampered by their doctrine of non-resistance. It was 
still the aim of William, therefore, to discourage all violent coun- 
sels, and to confine himself to organizing such a general opposition 
as would force James by legal means to reconcile himself to the 
country, to abandon his policy at home and abroad, and to join the 
alliance against France. 

But at this moment the whole course of William's policy was 
changed by an unforeseen event. His own patience and that of 
the nation rested on the certainty of Mary's succession; for James 
was without a son, and five years had passed since the last preg- 
nancy of his second wife, Mary of Modena. But in the midst of 
the King's struggle with the Church it was announced that the 
Queen was again with child. Though the news was received with 
general unbelief, it at once forced on the crisis which William had 
hoped to defer. If, as the Catholics joyously foretold, the child 
were a boy, and, as was certain, brought up a Catholic, the highest 
Tory had to resolve at last whether the tyranny under which En- 
gland lay should go on forever. William could no longer blind 
himself to the need of a struggle, and a speedy one. " It is now or 
never," he said to Dykvelt. The hesitation of England was in- 
deed at an end. Danby, loyal above all to the Church, and firm 
in his hatred of subservience to France, answered for the Tories ; 
Compton for the High Churchmen, goaded at last into i-ebellion 
by the Declaration of Indulgence. The Earl of Devonshire — the 
Lord Cavendish of the Exclusion struggle — ^ answered for the 
Whigs. A formal invitation to William to intervene in arms for 
the restoration of English liberty and the protection of the Prot- 
estant reliffion was signed bv these leaders, and carried in June to 



658 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the Hague "by Herbert, the most popular of English seamen, who 
had been deprived of his command for a refusal to vote against 
the Test. The nobles who signed it called on William to appear 
with an army, and pledged themselves to rise in arms on his land- 
ing. Whatever lingering hesitation remained was swept away by 
the Trial of the Bishops and the birth of a Prince of Wales. The 
invitation was sent from London on the very day of tlie Acquit- 
tal. The general excitement, the shouts of the boats which cov- 
ered the river, the bonfires in every street, showed indeed that the 
country was on the eve of revolt. The army itself, on which James 
had implicitly relied, suddenly showed its sympathy with the peo- 
ple. James was at Hounslow when the news of the Acquittal 
reached him, and as he rode from the camp he heard a great shout 
behind him. " What is that ?" he asked. " It is nothing," was the 
reply — "only the soldiers are glad that the Bishops are acquitted!" 
"Do you call that nothing?" grumbled the King. The shout told 
him that he stood utterly alone in his realm. The peerage, the 
gentry, the bishops, the clergy, the Universities, every lawyer, 
every trader, every farmer, stood aloof from him. His very sol- 
diers forsook him. The most devoted Catholics pressed him to 
give way. But to give way was to reverse every act he had done 
since his accession, and to change the whole nature of his govern- 
ment. All show of legal rule had disappeared. Sherifi's, mayors, 
magistrates, appointed by the Crown in defiance of a Parliament- 
ary statute, were no real oflicers in the eye of the law. Even if 
the Houses were summoned, members returned by oflTicers such 
as these could form no legal Parliament. Hardly a minister of 
the Crown or a privy councilor exercised any lawful authority. 
James had brought things to such a pass that the restoration of 
legal government meant the absolute reversal of every act he had 
done. But he was in no mood to reverse his acts. His temper 
was only spurred to a more dogged obstinacy by danger and re- 
monstrance. He broke up the camp at Hounslow and dispersed 
its troops in distant cantonments. He dismissed the two judges 
who had favored the acquittal of the Bishops. He ordered the 
chancellor of each diocese to report the names of the clergy who 
had not read the Declaration of Indulgence. But his will broke 
fruitlessly against the sullen resistance which met him on every 
side. Not a chancellor made a return to the Commissioners, and 
the Commissioners were cowed into inaction by the temper of the 
nation. When the judges who had displayed their servility to the 
Crown went on circuit, the gentry refused to meet them. A yet 
fiercer irritation was kindled by the King's resolve to supply the 
place of the English troops, whose temper proved unserviceable 
for his purposes, by drafts from the Catholic army which Tyr- 
connell had raised in Ireland, Even the Roman Catholic peers at 
the Council-table protested against this measure ; and six officers 
in a single regiment laid down their commissions rather than en- 
roll the'lrish recruits among their men. The ballad of " Lillibul- 
lero," a scurrilous attack on the Irish Papists, was sung from one 
lend of England to the other. 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



659 



What prevented revolt was the general resolve to wait for the 
appearance of the Prince of Orange. William was gathering forces 
and transports with wonderful rapidity and secrecy, while noble 
after noble made their way to the Hague. The Earl of Shrews- 
bury arrived with an offer of £12,000 toward the expedition. Ed- 
ward Russell, the brother of Lord Russell, appeared as the repre- 
sentative of the House of Bedford. They were followed by the 
representatives of great Tory houses, by the sons of the Marquis 
of Winchester, of Lord Danby, of Lord Peterborough, and by the 
High-Church Lord Macclesfield, At home the Earls of Danby 
and Devonshire prepared silently with Lord Lumley for a rising 
in the north. In spite of the profound secrecy with which all 
was conducted, the keen instinct of Sunderland, who had stooped 
to purchase continuance in office at the price of an apostasy to 
Catholicism, detected the preparations of William ; and the sense 
that his master's ruin was at hand encouraged him to tell every 
secret of James on the promise of a pardon for the crimes to which 
he had lent himself. James alone remained stubborn and insen- 
sate as of old. He had no fear of a revolt unaided by the Prince 
of Orange, and he believed that the threat of a French attack on 
Holland would render William's aid impossible. But in Septem- 
ber the long-delayed war began, and by the greatest political error 
of his reign Lewis threw his forces, not on Holland, but on Ger- 
many. The Dutch at once felt themselves secure ; the States- 
General gave their sanction to William's project, and the arma- 
ment he had prepared gathered rapidly in the Scheldt. The news 
no sooner reached England than the King passed from obstinacy 
to panic. By drafts from Scotland and L-eland he had muster- 
ed forty thousand men, but the temper of the troops robbed him 
of all trust in them. He dissolved the Ecclesiastical Commission. 
He replaced the magistrates he had driven from office. He re- 
stored their franchises to the towns. The Chancellor carried back 
the Charter of London in state into the City. James dismissed 
Sunderland from office, and produced before the Peers who were 
in London proofs of the birth of his child, which was almost uni- 
versally believed to be a Catholic imposture. But concession and 
proof came too late. Detained by ill winds, beaten back on its 
first venture by a violent storm, William's fleet of six hundred 
transports, escorted by fifty men-of-war, anchored on the fifth of 
November in Torbay ; and his army, thirteen thousand men strong, 
entered Exeter amid the shouts of its citizens. His coming had 
not been looked for in the west, and for a week no great land- 
owner joined him. But nobles and squires soon flocked to his 
camp, and the adhesion of Plymouth secured his rear. Meanwhile 
Danby, dashing at the head of a hundred horsemen into York, 
gave the signal for a rising in the north. The militia gave back 
his shout of " A free Parliament and the Protestant Religion !" 
Peers and gentry flocked to his standard ; and a march on Not- 
tingham united his forces to those under Devonshire, who had 
mustered at Derby the great lords of the midland and eastern 
counties. Every where the revolt was triumphant. The garrison 



660 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of Hall declared for a free Parliament. The Duke of Norfolk ap- 
peared at the head of three hundred gentlemen in the market-place 
at Norwich. Townsmen and gownsmen greeted Lord Lovelace 
at Oxford with uproarious welcome. Bristol threw open its gates 
to the Prince of Orange, who advanced steadily on Salisbury, where 
James had mustered his forces. But the Royal army fell back in 
disorder. Its very leaders were secretly pledged to William, and 
the desertion of Lord Churchill was followed by that of so many 
other officers that James abandoned the struggle in despair. He 
fled to London to hear that his daughter Anne had left St. James's 
to join Danby at Nottingham. " God help me," cried the wretch- 
ed King, " for my own children have forsaken me !" His spirit 
was vitterly broken ; and though he promised to call tlie Houses 
together, and dispatched commissioners to Huugerford to treat 
with William on the terms of a free Parliament, in his heart he 
had resolved on flight. Parliament, he said to the few who still 
clung to him, would force on him concessions he could not endure; 
and he only waited for news of the escape of his wife and child to 
make his way to the Isle of Sheppey, where a hoy lay ready to 
carry him to France. Some rough fishermen, who took him for a 
Jesuit, prevented his escape, and a troop of Life Guards brought 
him back in safety to London ; but it was the policy of William 
and his advisers to further a flight which removed their chief dif- 
ficulty out of the way. It would have been hard to dejjose James 
had he remained, and perilous to keep him prisoner; but the entry 
of the Dutch troops into London, the silence of the Prince, and an 
order to leave St. James's filled the King with fresh terrors, and, 
taking advantage of the means of escape which were almost openly 
placed at his disposal, James a second time quitted London, and 
embarked on the 23d of December unhindered for France. 

Before flying, James had burned most of the writs convoking 
the new Parliament, had disbanded his army, and destroyed so far 
as he could all means of government. For a few days there was 
a wild burst of panic and outrage in London, but the orderly in- 
stinct of the people soon reasserted itself. The Lords Avho were 
at the moment in London provided on their own authority as 
Privy Councilors for the more pressing needs of administration, 
and resigned their authority into William's hands on his arrival 
in the capital. The difficulty which arose from the absence of 
any person legally authorized to call Parliament together was got 
over by convoking the House of Peers, and forming a second body 
of all members who had sat in the Commons in the reign of Charles 
the Second, with the aldermen and common councilors of Lon- 
don. Both bodies requested William to take on himself the pro- 
visional government of the kingdom, and to issue circular letters 
inviting the electors of every town and county to send up repre- 
sentatives to a Convention which met in January, 1689. Both 
Houses were found equally resolved against any recall of or nego- 
tiation with the fallen King. But with this step their unanimity 
ended. The Whigs, who formed a majority in the Commons, voted 
a resolution which, illogical and inconsistent as it seemed, was well 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



601 



adapted to unite in its favor every element of the opposition to 
James : the Churchman, who was simply scared by his bigotry ; 
the Tory, who doubted the right of a nation to depose its King; 
the Whig, who held the theory of a contract between King and 
People. They voted that King James, "having endeavored to 
subvert the Constitution of this kingdom by breaking the original 
contract between King and People, and by the advice of Jesuits 
and other wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws, 
and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated 
the government, and that the throne is thereby vacant." But in 
the Lords the Tories were still in the ascendant, and the resolu- 
tion was fiercely debated. Archbishop Sancroft, with the High 
Tories, held that no crime could bring about a forfeiture of the 
crown, and that James still remained King, but that his tyranny 
had given the nation a right to withdraw from him the actual exer- 
cise of government and to intrust its functions to a Regency. The 
moderate Tories, under Danby's guidance, admitted that James 
had ceased to be King, but denied that the throne could be vacant, 
and contended that from the moment of his abdication the sov- 
ereignty vested in his daughter Mary. It was in vain that the 
eloquence of Halifax backed the Whig peers in struggling for the 
resolution of the Commons as it stood. The plan of a Regency 
was lost by a single vote, and Danby's scheme was adopted by a 
large majority. But both the Tory courses found a sudden ob- 
stacle in William. He declined to be Regent. He had no mind, 
he said to Danby, to bo his wife's gentleman-usher. Mary, on the 
other hand, refused to accept the crown save in conjunction with 
her husband. The two declarations put an end to the question. 
It was agreed that William afid Mary should be acknowledged as 
joint sovereigns, but that the actual administration should rest 
with William alone. Somers, a young lawyer who had just dis- 
tinguished himself in the trial of the Bishops, and who was des- 
tined to play a great part in later history, drew up a Declaration 
of Rights which was presented on February 13th to William and 
Mary by the two Houses in the banqueting-room at Whitehall. 
It recited the misgovernment of James, his abdication, and the re- 
solve of the Lords and Commons to assert the ancient rights and 
liberties of English subjects. It denied the right of any king to 
exercise a dispensing power, or to exact money or to maintain an 
army save by consent of Parliament. It asserted for the subject 
a right to petition, to a free choice of representatives in Parlia- 
ment, and a pure and merciful administration of justice. It de- 
clared the right of both Houses to liberty of debate. In full fiith 
that these principles would be accepted and maintained by Wil- 
liam and Mary, it ended with declaring the Prince and Princess 
of Orange King and Queen of England. At the close of the Dec- 
laration, Halifixx, in the name of the Estates of the Realm, prayed 
them to receive the crown. William accepted the offer in his 
own name and his wife's, and declared in a few words the resolve 
of both to maintain the laws and to govern by advice of Parlia- 
ment. 



662 



HISTOR Y OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Section VIII.— 1'Iie Grand Alliance. 1< 

\_Authorities. — As before.] 



)-1694. 



The blunder of Lewis in choosing Germany instead of Holland 
for bis point of attack was all but atoned for by the brilliant suc- 
cesses with which he opened the war. The whole country west 
of the Rhine was soon in his hands ; his armies Avere master of the 
Palatinate, and penetrated even to Wiirtemberg. His hopes had 
never been higher than at the moment when the arrival of James 
at St. Germains dashed all hope to the ground. Lewis was at 
once thrown back on a war of defense, and the brutal ravages 
which marked the retreat of his armies from the Hhine revealed 
the bitterness with which his pride stooped to the necessity. The 
Palatinate was turned into a desert. The same ruin fell on the 
stately palace of the Elector at Heidelberg, on the venerable tombs 
of the Emperors at Speyer, on the town of the trader, on the hut 
of the vine-dresser. Outrages such as these only hastened the 
work of his great rival. In accepting the English throne William 
had knit together England and Holland, the two great Protest- 
ant powers whose fleets had the mastery of the sea, as his diplo- 
macy had knit all Germany together a year before in the Treaty 
of Augsburg. But the formation of the Grand Alliance might 
still have been delayed by the reluctance of the Emperor to league 
with Protestant states against a Catholic king, when the ravage 
of the Palatinate awoke a thirst for vengeance in every Germaij 
heart before Avhich all hesitation passed away. The reception of 
James as still King of England at St. Germains gave England just 
ground for a declaration of war, a step in which it was soon fol- 
lowed by Holland, and the two countries at once agreed to stand 
by one another in their struggle against France. The adhesion 
of the Empire and of the two branches of the House of Austria to 
this agreement completed the Grand Alliance which William had 
designed. When Savoy joined the Allies in May, 1689, France 
found herself girt in on every side save Switzerland with a ring 
of foes. The Scandinavian kingdoms alone stood aloof from the 
confederacy of Eui'ope, and their neutrality was unfriendly to 
France. Lewis was left without a single ally save the Turk; but 
the energy and quickness of movement which sprang from the 
concentration of the power of France in a single hand still left the 
contest an equal one. The Empire was slow ; Austria was dis- 
tracted by the war with the Turks ; Spain was all but powerless ; 
Holland and England were alone earnest in the struggle, and En- 
gland could as yet give little aid in the war. An English bri- 
gade, formed from the regiments raised by James, joined the Dutch 
army on the Sambre, and distinguished itself under Churchill, who 
had been rewarded for his treason by the title of Earl of Marlbor- 
ough, in a brisk skirmish with the enemy at Walcourt. But Will- 
iam had as yet grave work to do at home. 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



663 



In England not a sword had been drawn for James, In Scot- 
land his tyranny had been yet greater than in England, and so 
far as the Lowlands went the fall of his tyranny was as rapid and 
complete. ISTo sooner had he called his troops southward to meet 
William's invasion than Edinburgh rose in revolt. The western 
peasants were at once up in arms, and the Episcopalian clergy, 
who had been the instruments of the Stuart misgovernment ever 
since the Restoration, were rabbled and driven from their parson- 
ages in every parish. The news of these disorders forced William 
to act, though he was without a show of legal authority over Scot- 
land ; and, on the advice of the Scotch Lords present in London, 
he ventured to summon a Convention similar to that Avhich had 
been summoned in England, and on his own responsibility to set 
aside the laws which excluded Presbyterians from the Scotch Par- 
liament. This Convention resolved that James had forfeited the 
crown by misgovernment, and offered it to William and Mary. 
The offer was accompanied by a Claim of Right framed on the 
model of the Declaration of Rights to which they had consented 
in England, but closing with a demand for the abolition of Prelac)'". 
Both crown and claim were accepted, and the arrival of the Scotch 
regiments which William had brought from Holland gave strength 
to the new Government. Its strength was to be roughly tested. 
John Graham of Claverhouse, whose cruelties in the persecution 
of the western Covenanters had been rewarded by the title of 
Viscount Dundee, withdrew with a few troopers from Edinburgh 
to the Highlands, and appealed to the clans. In the Highlands 
nothing was known of English government or misgovernment : all 
that the Revolution meant to a Highlander was the restoration of 
the House of Argyle. The Macdonalds, the Macleans, the Cam- 
erons, were as ready to join Dundee in fighting their old oppress- 
ors, the Campbells, and the Government which upheld them, as 
the}'' had been ready to join Montrose in the same cause forty 
years before. As William's Scotch regiments under General Mac- 
kay climbed the pass of Killiecrankie (July 27, 1689), Dundee 
charged them at the head of three thousand clansmen and swept 
them in headlong rout down the glen. But his death in the mo- 
ment of victory broke the only bond which held the Highlanders 
together, and in a few Aveeks the host which had spread terror 
through the Lowlands melted helplessly away. In the next sum- 
mer Mackay. was able to build the strong post of Fort William 
in the very heart of the disaffected country, and his offers of money 
and pardon brought about the submission of the clans. Sir John 
Dalrymple, the Master of Stair, in whose hands the government 
of Scotland at this time mainly rested, had hoped that a refusal 
of the oath of allegiance would give grounds for a war of exter- 
mination, and free Scotland forever from its terror of the High- 
landers. He had provided for the expected refusal by orders of a 
ruthless severity. " Your troops," he wrote to the officer in com- 
mand, " will destroy entirely the country of Lochaber, Locheil's 
lands, Keppoch's, Glengarry's, and Glencoe's. Your powei's shall 
be large enough. I hope the soldiers will not trouble the Govern- 



664 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ment with prisoners." But liis hopes were disappointed by the 
readiness with which the clans accepted the oiFers of the govern- 
ment. All submitted in good time save Macdonald of Glencoe, 
whose pride delayed his taking of the oath till six days after the 
latest date fixed by the proclamation. Foiled in his larger hopes 
of destruction, Dalrymple seized eagerly on the pretext given by 
Macdonald, and an order "for the extirpation of that nest of rob- 
bers" was laid before William and received the Royal signature. 
"The work," wrote the Master of Stair to Colonel Hamilton, who 
undertook it, " must be secret and sudden." The troops were 
chosen from among the Campbells, the deadly foes of the clans- 
men of Glencoe, and quartered peacefully among the Macdonalds 
for twelve days, till all suspicion of their errand disappeared. At 
daybreak (Feb. 13, 1692) they fell on their hosts, and in a few 
moments thirty of the clansfolk lay dead on the snow. The rest, 
sheltered by a storm, escaped to the mountains to perish for the 
most part of cold and hunger. " The only thing I regret," said 
the Master of Stair when the news reached him, "is that any got 
away." Whatever horror the Massacre of Glencoe has roused in 
later days, few save Dalrymple knew of it at the time. The peace 
of the Highlands enabled the work of reorganization to go on 
quietly at Edinburgh. In accepting the Claim of Right with its 
repudiation of Prelacy, William had in effect restored the Presby- 
terian Church, and its restoration was accompanied by the revival 
of the Westminster Confession as a standard of faith, and by the 
passing of an Act which abolished lay patronage. Against the 
Toleration Act which the King proposed, the Scotch Parliament 
stood firm. But the King was as firm in his purpose as the Par- 
liament. So long as he reigned, William declared in memorable 
words, there should be no persecution for conscience' sake. " We 
never could be of that mind that violence was suited to the ad- 
vancing of true religion, nor do we intend that our authority shall 
ever be a tool to the irregular passions of any party." 

It was not in Scotland, however, but in Ireland, that James and 
Lewis hoped to arrest William's progress. As we have noticed 
before, James had resolved soon after his accession to make Ire- 
land a refuge for himself and his Catholic subjects in case of mis- 
hap. As we have seen. Lord Tyrconnell had been made general, 
and then raised to the post of Lord Deputy, with a view to the 
carrying out of this purpose ; the army had been remodeled 
by disbanding its Protestant soldiers and filling the ranks with 
Papists; a similar process had "purified" the "bench of judges; 
the town charters had been seized into the King's hands, and Cath- 
olic mayors and Catholic sheriffs set at the head of every city and 
county. With power thus placed in the hands of their bitter en- 
emies, the terror of a new Irish massacre spread fast among the 
humbled Protestants. Those of the south for the most part forsook 
their homes and fled over-sea, while those of the north drcAV to- 
gether at Enniskillen and Londonderry. The news of the King's 
fall intensified the panic. For two months Tyrconnell intrigued 
with William's government, but his aim was simply to gain time, 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



665 



and at the opening of 1689 a flag was hoisted over Dublin Castle, 
with the words " Now or Never " embroidered on its folds. The 
signal called every Catholic to arms. The maddened natives flung 
themselves on the plunder which their masters had left, and in a 
few weeks havoc was done, the French envoy told Lewis, which 
it would take years to repair. Meanwhile James sailed from France 
to Kinsale. His first work was to crush the Protestants who stood 
in arms in the north. Fifty thousand men had gathered to Tyr- 
connell's standard, and about half the number Avere sent against 
Londonderry, where the bulk of the fugitives found shelter behind 
a weak wall, manned by a few old guns, and destitute even of a 
ditch. But the seven thousand desperate Englishmen behind the 
wall made ujd for its weakness. So fierce were their sallies, so 
crushing the repulse of his attack, that the King's general, Hamil- 
ton, at last turned the siege into a blocka^de. The Protestants 
died of hunger in the streets, and of the fever which comes of 
hunger, but the cry of the town was still "No Surrender." The 
siege had lasted a hundred and five days, and only two days' food 
remained in Londonderry, when on the 28th of July an English 
ship broke the boom across the river, and the besiegers sullenly 
withdrew. Their defeat was turned into a rout by the men of En- 
niskillen, who struggled through a bog to charge an Irish force of 
double their number at Newtown Butler, and drove horse and foot 
before them in a panic which soon spread through Hamilton's 
whole army. The routed soldiers fell back onDublin, where James 
lay helpless in the hands of the frenzied Catholics. In the Parlia- 
ment he had summoned every member returned was an Irishman 
and a Papist, and its one aim was the ruin of the English settlers. 
The Act of Settlement, on which all title to property rested, was 
at once repealed. Three thousand Protestants of name and for- 
tune were massed together in the hugest Bill of Attainder which 
the world has seen. In spite of the love which James professed 
for religious freedom, the Protestant clergy were driven from their 
parsonages, Fellows and scholars were turned out of Trinity Col- 
lege, and the French envoy, the Count of Avaux, dared even to 
propose a general massacre of the Protestants who still lingered 
in the districts which had submitted to James. To his credit the 
King shrank horror-struck from the proposal. " I can not be so 
cruel," he said, " as to cut their throats while they live peaceably 
under my government." "Mercy to Protestants," was the cold 
reply, "is cruelty to Catholics." 

Through the long agony of Londonderry, through the proscrip- 
tion and bloodshed of the new Irish rule, William was forced to 
look helplessly on. The best troops in the army which had been 
mustered at Hounslow followed Marlborough to the Sambre ; and 
with the political embarrassments which grew up around the gov- 
ernment it was unable to spare a man of those who remained. 
The great ends of the Revolution were indeed secured, even amid 
the confusion and intrigue which Ave shall have to describe, by the 
common consent of all. On the great questions of civil liberty 
Whig and Tory Avere now at one. The Declaration of Right Avas 



666 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



turned into the Bill of Rights, and the passing of this measure in 
1689 restored to the monarchy the character which it had lost 
under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The right of the people through 
its representatives to depose the King, to change the order of suc- 
cession, and to set on the throne whom they would, was now es- 
tablished. All claim of divine right, or hereditary right independ- 
ent of the law, was formally put an end to by the election of 
William and Mar3\ Since their day no English sovereign has been 
able to advance any claim to the crown save a claim which rested 
on a particular clause in a particular Act of Parliament. William, 
Mary, and Anne were sovereigns simply by virtue of the Bill of 
Rights. George the First and his successors have been sovereigns 
solely by virtue of the Act of Settlement. An English monarch 
is now as much the creature of an Act of Parliament as the pettiest 
tax-gatherer in his realm. A limitation of the righu of succession 
which expressed this Parliamentary origin of the sovereign's right 
in the strongest possible way was found in the provision " that 
whosoever shall hereafter come to the possession of this crown 
shall join in communion with the Church of England as by law 
establislied." Nor was the older character of the kingship alone 
restored. The older constitution returned with it. Bitter expe- 
rience had taught England the need of restoring to the Parliament 
its absolute power over taxation. The grant of revenue for life to 
the last two kings had been the secret of their anti-national policy, 
and the first act of the new legislature was to restrict the grant 
of the royal revenue to a term of four years. William was bitter- 
ly galled by the provision. " The gentlemen of England trusted 
King James," he said, "who was an enemy of their religion an4 
their laws, and they will not trust me, by whom their religion and 
their laws have been preserved." But the only change brought 
about in the Parliament by this burst of royal anger was a resolve 
henceforth to make the vote of supplies an annual one, and this 
resolve has been adhered to ever since. A change of almost as 
great importance established the control of Parliament over the 
army. The hatred to a standing army which had begun under 
Cromwell had only deejjened under James ; but with the Conti- 
nental war the existence of an array was a necessity. As yet, how- 
ever, it was a force which had no legal existence. The soldier 
was simply an ordinary subject; there were no legal means of 
punishing strictly military oifenses or of providing for military 
discipline ; and the assumed power of billeting soldiers in private 
houses had been taken away by the law. The difficulty both of 
Parliament and the army was met by the Mutiny Act. The 
powers requisite for discipline in the army were conferred by Par- 
liament on its officers, and provision was made for the jDay of the 
force, but both pay and disciplinary powers v/ere granted only for 
a single year. The Mutiny Act, like the grant of supplies, has re- 
mained annual ever since the Revolution ; and as it is impossible 
for the State to exist without supplies, or for the army to exist 
without discipline and pay, the annual assembly of Parliament has 
become a matter of absolute necessity, and the greatest constitu- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



667 



tional change which our history has witnessed was thus brought 
about in an indirect but pei-fectly efficient way. The dangers 
which experience had lately shown lay in the Parliament itself 
were met with far less skill. Under Charles England had seen a 
Parliament, which had been returned in a moment of reaction, 
maintained without fresh election for eighteen years. A Trien- 
nial Bill, which limited the duration of a Parliament to three, was 
passed with little opposition, but fell before the dislike and veto 
of William. To counteract the influence which a king might ob- 
tain by crowding the Commons with officials proved a yet harder 
task. A Place Bill, which excluded all persons in the employment 
of the State from a seat in Parliament, was defeated, and wisely 
defeated, in the Lords. The modern course of ey.luding all minor 
officials, but of preserving the hold of Parliament over the great 
officers of State by admitting them into its body, seems as yet to 
have occurred to nobody. It is equally strange that while vindi- 
cating its right of Parliamentary control over the public revenue 
and the army, the Bill of Rights should have left by its silence the 
control of trade to the Crown. It was only a few years later, in 
the discussions on the charter granted to the East India Compan}^, 
that the Houses silently claimed and obtained the right of regu- 
lating English commerce. 

The religious results of the Revolution were hardly less weighty 
than the political. In the common struggle against Catholicism, 
Churchman and Nonconformist had found themselves, as we have 
seen, strangely at one ; and schemes of Comprehension became sud- 
denly popular. But Avith the fall of James the union of the tAvo 
bodies abruptly ceased ; and the establishment of a Presbyterian 
Church in Scotland, together with the " rabbling " of the Episcopa- 
lian clergy in its western shires, revived the old bitterness of the 
clergy toward the dissidents. The Convocation rejected the scheme 
of the Latitudinarians for such modifications of the Prayer-book as 
would render possible a return of the Nonconformists, and a Com- 
prehension Bill which was introduced into Parliament failed to pass 
in spite of the King's strenuous support. William's attempt to 
admit Dissenters to civil equality by a repeal of the Test and Cor- 
poration Act proved equally fruitless. Active persecution, however, 
had now become impossible, and the passing of a Toleration Act 
in 1689 established a complete freedom of worship. Whatever the 
religious efiect of the failure of the Latitudinarian schemes may 
have been, its political effect has been of the highest value. At 
no time had the Church been so strong or so popular as at the Rev- 
olution, and the reconciliation of the iSTonconformists would have 
doubled its strength. It is doubtful whether the disinclination to 
all political change which has characterized it during the last two 
hundred years would have been affected by such a change; but it 
is certain that the power of opposition which it has wielded would 
have been enormously increased. As it was, the Toleration Act 
established a group of religious bodies, whose religious opposition 
to the Church forced them to support the measures of progress 
which the Church opposed. With religious forces on the one side 



668 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



and on tlie other, England has escaped the great stumbling-block 
in the way of nations where the cause of religion has become iden- 
tified with that of political reaction. A secession from within its 
own ranks weakened the Church still more. The doctrine of di- 
vine right had a strong hold on the body of the clergy, though 
they had been driven from their other favorite doctrine of passive 
obedience, and the requirement of the oath of allegiance to the 
new sovereigns from all persons in public functions was resented 
as an intolerable wrong by almost every parson. Bancroft, the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, with a few prelates and a large number 
of the higher clergy, absolutely refused the oath, treated all who 
took it as schismatics, and on their deprivation by Act of Parlia- 
ment regarded themselves and their adherents, who were known 
as Nonjurors, as the only members of the true Church of England. 
The bulk of the clergy bowed to necessity, but their bitterness 
against the new government was fanned by the expulsion of the 
Nonjurors into a flame, and added to the difficulties which William 
had to encounter. 

Not the least of his difficulties arose from the temper of his Par- 
liaments. In 1689 the Convention declared itself a Parliament. 
In the Commons the bulk of the members were Whigs, and their 
first acts were to redress the wrongs which the Whig party had 
suffered during the last two reigns. The attainder of Lord Rus- 
sell was reversed. The judgments against Sidney, Cornish, and 
Alice Lisle were annulled. In spite of the opinion of the judges 
that the sentence on Titus Gates had been against law, the Lords 
refused to reverse it, but even Gates received a pardon and a pen- 
sion. The Whigs however wanted, not only the redress of wrongs, 
but the punishment of the wrong-doers. Whig and Tory had been 
united, indeed, by the tyranny of James ; both parties had shared 
in the Revolution, and William had striven to prolong their union 
by joining the leaders of both in his first Ministry. He named 
the Tory Danby Lord President, made the Whig Shrewsbury Sec- 
retary of State, and gave the Privy Seal to Halifax, a trimmer 
between the one party and the other. But save in a moment of 
common oppression or common danger union was impossible. The 
Whigs clamored for the punishment of Tories who had joined in 
the illegal acts of Charles and of James. They refused to pass 
the Bill of General Indemnity which William laid before them. 
William, on the other hand, was resolved that no bloodshed or 
proscription should follow the revolution which had placed him 
on the throne. His temper was averse to persecution ; he had no 
great love for either of the battling parties; and, ab.ove all, he 
saw that internal strife would be fatal to the effective prosecution 
of the war. While the cares of his new throne were chaining him 
to England, the confederacy of which he was the guiding spirit 
was proving too slow and too loosely compacted to cope with the 
swift and resolute movements of France. The armies of Lewis 
had fallen back within their own borders, but only to turn fiercely 
at bay. The junction of the English and Dutch fleets failed to 
assure them the mastery of the seas. The English navy was par- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



669 



alyzed by the corruption which prevailed in the public service, 
as well, as by the sloth and incaj^acity of its commander. The 
services of Admiral Herbert at the Revolution had been rewarded 
by the earldom of Ton'ington and the command of the fleet ; but 
his indolence suffered the seas to be swept by French privateers, 
and his want of seamanship was shown in an indecisive engage- 
ment with a French squadron in Bantry Bay. Meanwhile Lewis 
was straining every nerve to win the command of the Channel; 
the French dock-yards were turning out ship after ship, and the 
galleys of the Mediterranean fleet were brought round to reinforce 
the fleet at Brest. A French victory off the English coast would 
have brought serious political danger, for the reaction of popular 
feeling which had begun in favor of James had been increased by 
the pressure of the war, by the taxation, by the exjDulsion of the 
Nonjurors and the discontent of the clergy, by the panic of the 
Tories at the spirit of vengeance which broke out among the tri- 
umphant Whigs, and above all by the presence of James in Ire- 
land. A new party, that of the Jacobites or adherents of King- 
James, was just forming; and it was feared that a Jacobite rising 
would follow the appearance of a French fleet on the coast. In 
such a state of affairs William judged rightly that to yield to the 
Whig thirst for vengeance would have been to ruin his cause. 
He dissolved the Parliament, issued in his own name a general 
j)ardon for all political offenses, under the title of an Act of Grace, 
and accepted the resignations of the more violent Whigs among 
his counselors. Danby was intrusted with the chief administra- 
tion of affairs ; for Danby had power over the Tories, and in the 
new Parliament which was called in 1690 the bulk of the members 
proved Tories. William's aim in this sudden change of front was 
to secure a momentary lull in English faction which would suffer 
him to strike at the rebellion in Ireland. While James was King 
in Dublin it was hopeless to crush treason at home ; and so urgent 
was the danger, so precious every moment in the present junctui'e 
of affairs, that William could trust no one to bring the work as 
sharply to an end as was needful save himself. 

In the autumn of the year 1689 the Duke of Schomberg had 
been sent with a small force to Ulster, but his landing had only 
roused Ireland to a fresh enthusiasm. The ranks of the Irish army 
were filled up at once, and James Avas able to face the Duke at 
Drogheda with a force double that of his opponent. Schomberg, 
whose forces were all raw recruits whom it was hardly possible to 
trust at such odds in the field, intrenched himself in Dundalk, in 
a camp where pestilence soon swept off half his men, till winter 
parted the two armies. During the next six months James, whose 
treasury was utterly exhausted, strove to fill it by a coinage of 
brass money, while his soldiers subsisted by sheer plunder. Wil- 
liam meanwhile was toiling hard on the other side of the Channel 
to bring the war to an end. Schomberg was strengthened during 
the winter with men and stores, and when the spring came his 
force reached thirty thousand men. Lewis, too, felt the impor- 
tance of the coming struggle; and seven thousand picked French- 



670 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



men, under the Count of Lauzun, were dispatched to reinforce the 
armjr of James. They had hardly arrived when William himself 
landed at Carrickfergus, and pushed rapidly to the south. His 
columns soon caught sight of the Irish array, posted strongly be- 
hind the Boyne. "I am glad to see you, gentlemen," William 
cried with a burst of delight ; " and if you escape me now the 
fault will be mine." Early next morning, the first of July, 1690, 
the whole English army plunged into the river. The Irish foot 
broke in a shameful panic, but the horse made so gallant a stand 
that Schomberg fell in repulsing its charge, and for a time the 
English centre was held in check. With the arrival of William, 
however, at the head of the left wing, all was over. James, who 
had looked helplessly on, fled to Dublin, and took ship at Kinsale 
for France, while the capital threw open its gates to the conqueror. 
The cowardice of the Stuart sovereign moved the scorn even of his 
followers. " Change kings with us," an Irish officer replied to an 
Englishman who taunted him with the panic of the Boyne — "change 
kings with us, and we will fight you again," They did better in 
fighting without a king. The French, indeed, withdrew scornfully 
from the routed army as it stood at bay beneath the walls of Lim- 
erick. " Do you call these ramparts ?" sneered Lauzun ; " the 
English will need no cannon ; they may batter them down with 
roasted apples." But twenty thousand men remained with Sars- 
field, a brave and skillful officer who had seen service in England 
and abroad ; and his daring surprise of the English ammunition 
train, his repulse of a desperate attempt to storm the town, and 
the approach of the winter, forced William to raise the siege. The 
turn of the war abroad recalled him to England, and he left his, 
work to one who was quietly proving himself a master in the art 
of war. Lord Marlborough had been recalled from Flanders to 
command a division which had landed in the south of Ireland. 
Only a few days remained before winter would come to break off 
operations, but the few days were turned to good account, Cork, 
with five thousand men behind its walls, was taken in forty-eight 
hours, Kinsale a few days later shared the fate of Cork, Winter 
indeed left Connaught and the greater part of Munster in Irish 
hands; the French force remained untouched, and the coming of 
a new French general, St, Ruth, with arms and supplies, encour- 
aged the insurgents. But the spring of 1691 had hardly opened 
when Ginkell, the new English general, by his seizure of Athlone 
forced on a battle with the combined French and Irish forces at 
Aughrim, in which St. Ruth fell on the field and his army was ut- 
terly broken. The defeat left Limerick alone in its revolt, and 
even Sarsfield bowed to the necessity of a surrender. Two treaties 
were drawn up between the Irish and English generals. By the 
first it was stipulated that the Catholics of Ireland should enjoy 
such privileges in the exercise of their religion as were consistent 
with law, or as they had enjoyed in the reign of Charles the Sec- 
ond. Both sides were, of course, well aware that such a treaty 
Avas merely waste paper, for Ginkell had no power to conclude it, 
nor had the Irish Lords Justices. The latter, indeed, only prom- 



IX. J 



THE REVOLUTION. 



G71 



ised to do all they could to bring about its ratification by Parlia- 
ment, and this ratification was never granted. By the military 
treaty, those of Sarsfield's soldiers who would were sufi:ered to 
follow him to France ; and ten thousand men, the whole of his 
force, chose exile rather -than life in a land where all hope of na- 
tional freedom was lost. When the wild cry of the women who 
stood watching their departure was hushed, the silence of death 
settled down upon Ireland._ For a hundred years the country re- 
mained at peace, but the peace was a peace of despair. The most 
terrible legal tyranny under which a nation has ever groaned 
avenged the rising under Tyrconnell. The conquered people, in 
Swift's bitter words of contempt, became " hewers of wood and 
drawers of water" to their conquerors; but till the very eve of 
the French Revolution Ireland ceased to be a source of terror and 
anxiety to England. 

Short as the struggle of Ireland had been, it had served Lewis 
well, for while William was busy at the Boyne a series of brilliant 
successes restored the fortunes of France, In Flanders the Duke 
of Luxemburg won the victory of Fleurus. In Italy Marshal 
Catinat defeated the Duke of Savoy. A success of even greater 
moment, the last victory which France was fated to win at sea, 
placed for an instant the very throne of William in peril. William 
never showed a cooler courage than in quitting England to fight 
James in Ireland at a moment when the Jacobites were only look- 
ing for the appearance of a French fleet on the coast to rise in 
revolt. He was hardly on his way, in fact, when Tourville, the 
French admiral, put to sea with strict orders to fight. He was 
met by the English and Dutch fleet at Beachy Head, and the 
Dutch division at once engaged. Though utterly outnumbered, 
it fought stubbornly in hope of Herbert's aid ; but Herbert, wheth- 
er from cowardice or treason, looked idly on while his allies were 
crushed, and withdrew at nightfall to seek shelter in the Thames. 
The danger was as great as the shame, for Tourville's victory left 
him master of the Channel, and his presence off" the coast of Devon 
invited the Jacobites to revolt. But whatever the discontent of 
Tories and Nonjurors against William might be, all signs of it 
vanished with the landing of the French. The burning of Teign- 
raouth by Tourville's sailors called the whole coast to arms; and 
the news of the Boyne put an end to all dreams of a rising in fa- 
vor of James. The natural reaction against a cause which looked 
for foreign aid gave a new strength for the moment to William in 
England ; but ill luck still hung around the Grand Alliance. So 
urgent was ^he need for his presence abroad that William left as 
we have seen his work in Ireland undone, and crossed in the spring 
of 1691 to Flanders. It was the first time since the days of Henry 
the Eighth that an English king had appeared on the Continent at 
the head of an English army. But the slowness of the Allies again 
baffled William's hopes. He was forced to look on with a small 
army while a hundred thousand Frenchmen closed suddenly around 
Mons, the strongest fortress of the Netherlands, and made them- 
selves master of it in the presence of Lewis. The humiliation was 

43 



672 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



great, and for the moment all trust in William's fortune faded 
away. In England the blow was felt more heavily than elsewhere. 
The treason which had been crushed by the indignation at Tour- 
ville's descent woke up to a fresh life. Leading Tories, such as 
Lord Clarendon and Lord Dartmouth, opened communications with 
James; and some of the leading Whigs, with the Earl of Shrews- 
bury at their head, angered at what they regarded as William's 
ingratitude, followed them in their course. Li Lord Marlborough's 
mind the state of aifairs raised hopes of a double treason. Llis de- 
sign was to bring about a revolt which would drive William from 
the throne without replacing James, and give the crown to his 
daughter Anne, whose aftection for Marlborough's wife would 
place the real government of England in his hands. A yet greater 
danger lay in the treason of Admiral Russell, who had succeeded 
Torrington in command of the fleet. Kussell's defection would 
have removed the one obstacle to a new attempt which James 
was resolved to make for the recover}- of his throne, and which 
Lewis had been brought to support. In the beginning of 1692 an 
army of thirty thousand troops was quartered in Normandy in 
readiness for a descent on the English coast. Transports were 
provided for their passage, and Tourville was ordered to cover it 
with the French fleet at Brest. Though Russell had twice as many 
ships as his opponent, the belief in his purpose of betraying Wil- 
liam's cause was so strong that Lewis ordered Tourville to engage 
the allied fleets at any disadvantage. But whatever Russell's in- 
trigues may have meant, he was no Herbert. "Do not think I 
will let the French triumph over us in our own seas," he warned 
his Jacobite correspondents. " If I meet them I will fight then?, 
even though King James were on board." When the two fleets 
met off the Norman coast his fierce attack proved Russell true to 
his word. Tourville's fifty vessels proved no match for the ninety 
ships of the allies, and after five hours of a brave struggle the 
French were forced to fly along the rocky coast of the Cotentin. 
Twenty-two of their vessels reached St. Malo ; thirteen anchored 
with Tourville in the bays of Cherbourg and LaHogue; but their 
pursuers were soon upon them, and a bold attack of the English 
boats burned ship after ship under the eyes of the French army. 
All dread of the invasion was at once at an end ; and the throne 
of William was secured by the detection and suppression of the 
Jacobite conspiracy at home which the invasion was intended to 
support. But the overthrow of the Jacobite hopes was the least 
result of the victory of La Hogue. France ceased froni that mo- 
ment to exist as a great naval power ; for though her fleet was 
soon recruited to its former strength, the confidence of her sailors 
was lost, and not even Tourville ventui-ed again to tempt in battle 
the fortune of the seas. A new hope, too, broke on the Grand 
Alliance. The spell of French triumph was broken. The Duke 
of Luxembourg strove to restore the glory of the French arms 
by his victories over William in the two following j^ears (1693- 
1694) at Steinkirk and Neerwinden; but the battles were use- 
less butcheries, in which the conquerors lost as many men as 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



673 



the conquered. From that moment France felt herself disheart- 
ened and exhausted by the vastness of her efforts. The public 
misery was extreme. " The country," Fenelon wrote frankly to 
Lewis, " is a vast hospital." For the first time in his long career 
of prosperity Lewis bent his pride to seek peace at the sacrifice 
of his conquests, and though the effort was a vain one, it told that 
the daring hopes of French ambition were at an end, and that the 
work of the Grand Alliance was practically done. 

In outer seeming, the Revolution of 1688 had only transferred 
the sovereignty over England from James to William and Mary. 
In actual fact, it was transferring the sovereignty from the King 
to the House of Commons. From the moment when its sole right 
to tax the nation was established by the Bill of Rights, and when 
its own resolve settled the practice of granting none but annual 
supplies to the Crown, the House of Commons became the supreme 
power in the State. It was impossible permanently to suspend its 
sittings, or, in the long run, to oppose its will, when either course 
must end in leaving the Government penniless, in breaking up the 
army and navy, and in rendering the public service impossible. 
But though the constitutional change was complete, the machinery 
of government was fir from having adapted itself to the new con- 
ditions of political life which such a change brought about. How- 
ever powerful the will of the House of Commons might be, it had 
no means of bringing its will directly to bear upon the conduct 
of public affairs. The Ministers who had charge of them were not 
its servants, but the servants of the Crown ; it was from the King 
that they looked for direction, and to the King they held them- 
selves responsible. By impeachm'ent or more indirect means the 
Commons could force a King to remove a Minister who contra- 
dicted their will ; but they had no constitutional power to replace 
the fallen statesman by a Minister who would carry out their will. 
The result was the growth of a temper in the Lower House which 
drove William and his Ministers to despair. It became as corrupt, 
as jealous of power, as fickle in its resolves, as factious in spirit, as 
bodies always become whose consciousness of the possession of 
power is untempered by a corresponding consciousness of the prac- 
tical difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the power which 
they possess. It grumbled at the ill success of the war, at the 
suffering of the merchants, at the discontent of the Churchmen; 
and it blamed the Crown and its Ministers for all at which it 
grumbled. But it was hard to find out what policy or measures 
it would have preferred. Its mood changed, as William bitterly 
complained, with every hour. It was, in fact, without the guid- 
ance of recognized leaders, without adequate information, and des- 
titute of that organization out of which alone a definite policy can 
come. Nothing better proves the inborn political capacity of the 
English mind than that it should at once have found a simple and 
effective solution of such a difficulty as this. The credit of the so- 
lution belongs to a man whose political character was of the low- 
est type. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, had been a Minister in the 
later days of Charles the Second ;, and he had remained Minister 



674 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Skc. VIII. 1 throngh almost all the reign of James. He had held office at last 
only by compliance with the worst tyranny of his master, and by 
a feigned conversion to the Roman Catholic faitli. But the ruin 
of James was no sooner certain than he had secured pardon and 
protection from William by the betrayal of tlie master to whom 
he had sacrificed his conscience and his honoi*. Since the Revolu- 
tion, Sunderland had striven only to escape public observation in 
a country retirement, but at this crisis he came secretly forward 
to bring his unequaled sagacity to the aid of the King. His coun- 
sel was to recognize practically the new power of the Commons 
by choosing the Ministers of the Crown exclusively from among 
the members of the party which was strongest in the Lower Plouse. 
As yet no Ministry, in the modern sense of the term, had existed. 
Each great officer of State — Treasurer or Secretary or Lord Privy 
Seal — had in theory been independent of his fellow-officers ; each 
was tlie "King's servant," and responsible for the discharge of his 
special duties to the King alone. From time to time one Minister, 
like Clarendon, might tower above the rest and give a general di- 
rection to the whole course of government, but the predominance 
was merely personal, and never permanent; and even in such a 
case there were colleagues who were ready to oppose or even im- 
peach the statesman who overshadowed them. It was common for 
a King to choose or dismiss a single Minister without any commu- 
nication with the rest ; and so far from aiming at ministerial uni- 
ty, even William had striven to reproduce in the Cabinet itself the 
balance of parties which prevailed outside of it. Sunderland's plan 
aimed at replacing these independent Ministers by a homogeneous 
Ministry, chosen from tlie sam^ party, representing the same sen- 
timents, and bound together for common action by a sense of re- 
sponsibility and loyalty to the party to which it belonged. Not 
only would such a plan secure a unity of administration which 
had been unknown till then, but it gave an organization to the 
House of Commons which it never had before. The Ministers 
who were representatives of the majority of its members became 
the natural leaders of the House. Small factions were drawn to- 
gether into the two great parties which supported or opposed the 
Ministry of the Crown. Above all, it brought about in the sim- 
plest possible way the solution of the problem which had so long' 
vexed both King and Commons. The new Ministers ceased in all 
but name to be the King's servants. They became simply an Ex- 
ecutive Committea representing the will of the majority of the 
House of Commons, and capable of being easily set aside by it 
and replaced by a similar Committee whenever the balance of 
power shifted from one side of the House to the other. 

Such was the origin of that system of representative govern- 
ment which has gone on from Sunderland's day to our own. But 
though William showed his own political genius in understanding 
and adopting Sunderland's plan, it was only slowly and tentative- 
ly that he ventured to carry it out in practice. Li spite of the 
temporary reaction, Sunderland believed that the balance of polit- 
ical power was really on the side of the Whigs. JSTot only were 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



675 



they the natural representatives of the principles of the Revolu- 
tion, and the supporters of the war, but they stood far above their 
opponents in Parliamentary and administrative talent. At their 
head stood a grouj) of statesmen whose close union in thought and 
action gained them the name of the Junto, Russell, as yet the 
most prominent of these, was the victor of La Hogue ; Soraers 
was a young advocate who had sprung into fame by his defense 
of the Seven Bishops ; Lord Wharton was known as the most dex- 
terous and unscrupulous of party managers; and Montague was 
fast making a reputation as the ablest of English financiers. In 
spite of such considerations, however, it is doubtful whether Will- 
iam would have thrown himself into the hands of a purely Whig 
Ministry but for the attitude which the Tories took toward the 
war. In spite of tlie exhaustion of France, the war still languished 
and the Allies still failed to win a single victory. Meanwhile En- 
glish trade was all but ruined by the French privateers, and the na- 
tion stood aghast at the growth of taxation. The Tories, always 
cold in their support of the Grand Alliance, now became eager for 
peace. The Whigs, on the other hand, remained resolute in their 
support of the war. William, in whose mind the contest with 
France was the first object, was thus driven slowly to follow Sun- 
derland's advice. In 1695 he dissolved Parliament, and the Whig 
tone of the new House of Commons enabled him to replace his 
Tory Ministers by the members of the Junto. Russell went to the 
Admiralty, Somers was named Lord Keeper, Montague Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, Shrewsbury Secretary of State. The changes 
were gradually made, but they had hardly begun when their effect 
was felt. The House of Commons took a new tone. The Whig 
majority of its members, united and disciplined, moved quietly 
imder the direction of their leaders, the new Ministers of the 
Crown. Great measures, financial and constitutional, passed rap- 
idly through Parliament. The Triennial Bill became law. In 
spite of the efforts of the Lords, the Commons refused to renew 
the bill for the censorshijD of the press, and its liberty was no soon- 
er thus recognized as legal (1695) than the recognition was at once 
followed by the appearance of a crowd of public prints. To meet 
the financial strain of the war, Montague established the Bank of 
England (1694) by adopting the plan which Paterson, a Scotch 
adventurer, had brought forward for the creation of a National 
Bank. The subscribers to a loan of £1,200,000 Avere formed into 
a Company, with no exclusive privileges, and restricted by law 
from lending money to the Crown without consent of Parliament; 
but so great had been the growth of the national wealth that in 
ten days the list of subscribers was full. A new source of power 
revealed itself in the discovery of the resources afforded by the na- 
tional credit ; and the rapid growth of the National Debt gave a 
new security against the return of the Stuarts, whose first work 
would have been the repudiation of it. With even greater cour- 
age and hardly less originality Montague faced the great difficulty 
of the debasement of the coinage, and carried out its reform. The 
power of the new administration, the evidence of the public credit, 



676 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



gave strength to William aLi-oad as at home. In 1695 the Alliance 
succeeded for the first time in winning a great triumph over France 
in the capture of ISTamur. Even in the troubled year which fol- 
lowed, and amid the distress created by the reform of the curren- 
cy, William Avas able to hold the French at bay. But the war 
was fast drawing to a close, Lewis was simply fighting to secure 
more favorable terms, and William, though he held that " the only 
way of treating with France is with our swords in our hands," was 
almost as eager as Lewis for a peace which would leave him free 
to deal with a question which the health of the King of Spain now 
brouo-ht every day closer — the question of the succession to the 
Spanish throne. The obstacles which were thrown in the way of 
an accommodation by Spain and the Empire were set aside by a 
private negotiation between William and Lewis* and the year 1697 
saw the conclusion of the Peace of Ryswick. In spite of failure 
and defeat in the field, William's policy had won. The victories 
of France remained baa-ren in the face of a united Europe ; and 
her exhaustion forced her, for the first time since Richelieu's day, 
to consent to a disadvantageous peace. The Empire was satisfied 
by the withdrawal of France from every annexation, save that of 
Strasbourg, which she had made since the Treaty of Nimegueu. 
To Spain Lewis restored Liixemburg and all the conquests he had 
made during the war in the Netherlands. The Duke of Lorraine 
was replaced in his dominions. What was a far heavier humilia- 
tion to Lewis personally was his abandonment of the Stuart cause 
and his recognition of William as King of England. The Peace 
of Ryswick was thus the final and decisive defeat of the conspir- 
acy which had gone on between Lewis and the Stuarts ever since 
the Treaty of Dover — the conspiracy to turn England into 'a 
Roman Catholic country and into a dependency of France. 



Section IX.— Mailborougto. 1698—1712. 

\_Authorities. — Lord Macaulay's great work, which practically ends at the Peace 
of Ilyswick, has been continued by Lord Stanhope ("History of England under 
Queen Anne ") during this period. For Marlborough himself the main authority 
must be the Duke's biography by Archdeacon Coxe, with his Dispatches. The 
French side of the war and negotiations has been carefully given by M. Martin 
("Histoire de France ") in what is the most accurate and judicious portion of his 
work. Swift's political tracts and Bolingbroke's correspondence are of great im- 
portance for the latter part of this period.] 



What had bowed the pride of Lewis to the humiliating terms 
of the Peace of Ryswick was not so much the exhaustion of France 
as the need of preparing for a new and greater struggle. The 
death of the King of Spain, Charles the Second, was known to 
be at hand ; and with him ended the male line of the Austrian 
princes, who for two hundred years had occupied the Spanish 
throne. How strangely Spain had fallen from its high estate ill 
Europe the Avars of Lewis had abundantly shown, but so vast was 
the extent of its empire, so enormous the resources which still re- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



677 



mained to it, that under a vigorous ruler men believed its old 
power would at once return. Its sovereign was still master of 
some of the noblest provinces of the Old World and the New — of 
Spain itself, of the Milanese, of Naples and Sicily, of the Nether- 
lands, of Southern America, of the noble islands of the Spanish 
Main. To add such a dominion as this to the dominion either of 
Lewis or of the Emperor would be to undo at a blow the work of 
European independence which William had wrought; and it was 
with a view to prevent either of these results that William freed 
his hands hj the Peace of Ryswick. At this moment the claim- 
ants of the Spanish succession were three : the Dauphin, a son of 
the Spanish King's elder sister; the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, a 
grandson of his younger sister; and the Emperor, who was a son 
of Charles's aunt: In strict law — if there had been any law really 
applicable to the matter — the claim of the last was the strongest 
of the three; for the^claim of the Dauphin was barred by an ex- 
press renunciation of all right to the ssccession at his mother's 
marriage with Lewis the Fourteenth, a renunciation which had been 
ratified at the Treaty of the Pyrenees; and a similar renunciation 
barred the claim of the Bavarian candidate. The claim of the 
Emperor w^as more remote in blood, but it was barred by no re- 
nunciation. William, however, was as resolute in the interests of 
Europe to repulse the claim of the Emperor as to repulse that of 
Lewis; and it was the consciousness that the Austrian succession 
was inevitable if the war continued and Spain remained a member 
of the Grand Alliance, in arms against France and leagued with 
the Emperor, Avhich made him suddenly conclude the Peace of 
Ryswick. Had England and Holland shared William's temper, 
he would have insisted on the succession of the Electoral Prince 
to the whole Spanish dominions. But both were weary of war. 
In England the peace was at once followed by the reduction of the 
army at the demand of the House of Commons to ten thousand 
men ; and a. clamor had already begun for the disbanding even of 
these. It Avas necessary to bribe the two rival claimants to a 
waiver of their claims, and by the First Partition Treaty, conclud- 
ed in 1698, between England, Holland, and France, the succession 
of the Electoral Prince was recognized on condition of the cession 
by Spain of its Italian possessions to his two rivals. The Milanese 
would thus pass to the Emperor, the Two Sicilies with the border 
province of Guipuscoa to France. But the arrangement was hard- 
ly concluded Avhen the death of the Bavarian prince made the 
Treaty waste paper. Austria and France were left face to face, 
and a terrible struggle, in which the success of either would be 
equally fatal to the independence of Europe, seemed unavoidable. 
The peril was greater that the temper of England left William 
without the means of backing his policy by arms. The suffering 
which the war had caused to the merchant class, and the pressure 
of the debt and taxation it entailed, were awaking every day a 
■more bitter resentment in the people, and the general discontent 
avenged itself on William and the party who had backed his pol- 
icy. The King's prodigal grants of crown-lands to his Dutch fa- 



G78 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



vovites, his cold and sullen demeanor, his endeavor to maintain the 
standing array, robbed him of whatever popularity he still retain- 
ed. The Whig Junto lost hold on the Commons. Montague was 
driven from his post, Somers was unscrupulously attacked, and 
even the boldest Whigs shrank from accepting office. William's 
earnest entreaty could not turn the Parliament from its resolve 
to send his Dutch guards out of the country, and to reduce the 
army from ten thousand men to seven. The navj^, which had 
numbered forty thousand sailors during the war, was at the same 
time cut down to eight. How much William's hands were weak- 
ened by this peace-temper of England was shown by the Second 
Partition Treaty, which was concluded in IVOO between the three 
powers. By this, in spite of the j^rotests of the Emperor, who re- 
fused to join in the Treaty or to surrender his claim to the whole 
Spanish monarchy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the Indies were 
assigned to his second son, the Archduke Charles of Austria. But 
the compensation granted to France was now increased. To the 
Two Sicilies was added the Duchy of Lorraine, whose Duke was 
transferred to the Milanese. If the Emperor still persisted in his 
refusal to come into the Treaty, his share was to pass to another 
unnamed prince, who Avas probably the Duke of Savoy. 

The Emperor still protested, but his protest was of little mo- 
ment so long as Lewis and the two maritime powers held firmly 
together. Nor was the bitter resentment of Spain of more aAail, 
The Spaniards cared little whether a French or an Austrian sat on 
the throne of Charles the Second, but their pride revolted against 
the dismemberment of the monarchy by the loss of its Italian 
dependencies. Even the miserable King shared the anger of his^ 
subjects, and a will wrested from him by the factions which wran- 
gled over his death-bed bequeathed the whole monarchy of Spain 
to a grandson of Lewis, the Duke of Anjou, the second son of the 
Dauphin. The Treaty of Partition was so recent, and the risk of 
accepting this bequest so great, that Lewis would hardly have re- 
solved on it but for his belief that the temper of England must 
necessarily render William's opposition a fruitless one. Never, in 
fact, had England been so averse to war. So strong was the 
antipathy to William's foreign policy that men openly approved 
of what Lewis had done. Hardly any one in England dreaded 
the succession of a boy who, French as he was, would as they be- 
lieved soon be turned into a Spaniard by the natural course of 
events. The succession of the Duke of Anjou was generally looked 
upon as far better than the increase of power which France would 
have derived from the cessions of the, last Treaty of Partition, ces- 
sions Avhich would have turned the Mediterranean, it was said, into 
a French lake. " It grieves me to the heart," William wrote bit- 
terly, "that almost every one rejoices that France has preferred 
the will to the Treaty." Astonished and angered as he was at 
his rival's breach of faith, he had no means of punishing it. In 
1701 the Duke of Anjou peaceably entered Madrid, and Lewis 
proudly boasted that henceforth there were no Pyrenees. The 
life-work of William seemed undone. He knew himself to be dy- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



079 



ing. His cough Avas incessant, Lis eyes sunk and dead, his frame 
so weak that he could hardly get into his coach. But never had 
he shown himself so great. His courage rose with every difficulty. 
His temper grew cooler and more serene with every insult. His 
large and clear-sighted intellect looked through the temporary 
enabarrassments of French diplomacy and English faction to the 
great interests which would in the end determine the course ol 
European politics. Abroad and at home all seemed to go against 
him. For the moment he had no ally save Holland, for Spain was 
now united with Lewis, and the Elector of Bavaria, who held charge 
of the Spanish Netherlands and on whom William had counted, 
joined the French side and proclaimed the Duke of Anjou as King 
in Brussels. The attitude of Bavaria divided Germany and held 
the House of Austria in check. In England the new Parliament 
was crowded with Tories, who were resolute against war; and 
William was forced in ] 701 to name a Tory Ministry with Lord 
Godolphin at its head, which pressed him to acknowledge the new 
King of Spain. As even Holland did this, William was forced to 
submit. He could only count on France to help him, and he did 
not count in vain.' Bitter as the strife of Whig and Tory might 
be in England, there were two things on which Whig and Tory 
■were agreed. Neither would suffer France to occupy the Nether- 
lands. Neither would endure a French attack on the Protestant 
succession which the Revolution of 1688 had established. But 
the greed of Lewis blinded him to the need of moderation in this 
hour of good-luck. The Spanish garrisons in the Netherlands were 
weak, and in the name of his grandson he introduced French troo23S 
into town after town. The English Parliament at once acquiesced 
in William's demand for their withdrawal; but the demand was 
haughtily rejected. Holland, fearful of invasion as the French 
troops gathered on her frontier, appealed to England for aid, and 
the Tory party in the Parliament saw with helpless rage that they 
were silently drifting into war. They impeached the leading 
members of the Junto for their share in the Partition Treaties; 
they insulted William, and delayed the supplies. But outside the 
House of Commons the tide of national feeling rose as the designs 
of Lewis grew clearer and a great French fleet gathered in the 
Channel. Its aim was revealed by the disclosure of a fresh Jaco- 
bite plot, the proofs of which were laid before Parliament. Even 
the House of Commons took fire. The fleet was raised to thirty 
thousand men, the army to ten thousand, and Kent sent up a re- 
monstrance against the factious measures by which the Tories still 
struggled against the King's policy, and a prayer "that addresses 
might be turned into Bills of Supply." William was encouraged 
by these signs of a change of temper to dispatch an English force 
to Holland, and to conclude a secret treaty with Holland and the 
Empire for the recovery of the Netherlands from France, and of 
the Sicilies and Milanese from Spain. But England at large was 
still clinging desperately to peace, when Lewis by a sudden act 
forced it into Avar. He had acknowledged William as King in the 
Peace of Ryswick, and pledged himself to oppose all attacks on 



680 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



his throne. He now entered the bedchamber at St. Germains 
where James was breathing his last, and promised to acknowledge 
his son at his death as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. 
The promise was, in fact, a declaration of war, and in a moment 
all England was unanimous in accepting the challenge. The issue 
Lewis had raised was no longer a matter of European politics, but 
the question w'hether the work of the Revolution should be un- 
done, and whether Catholicism and despotism should be replaced 
on the throne of England by the arms of France. On such a ques- 
tion as this there was no difference between Torj'- and Whig. Not 
a word of protest had been uttered when the death of the last liv- 
ing child of the Princess Anne was followed in 1701 by the passing 
of an Act of Settlement which, setting aside not only the pretend- 
ed Prince of Wales and a younger daughter of James the Second, 
but the Duchess of Savoy, a daughter of Henrietta of Orleans, and 
other claimants nearer in blood, as disqualified by their profession 
of the Catholic religion, vested the right to the crown in Sophia, 
Electress-Dowager of Hanover, a child of the Queen of Bohemia 
and a granddaughter of James the First, and the heirs of her body, 
being Protestants. The same national union showed itself in the 
King's welcome on his return from the Hague, where the conclu- 
sion of a new Grand Alliance between the Empire, Holland, and 
the United Provinces had rewarded William's patience and skill. 
The Alliance was soon joined by Denmark, Sweden, the Palatinate, 
and the bulk of the German States. The Parliament which Will- 
iam summoned in 1702, though still Tory in the main, replied to 
his stirring appeal by voting forty thousand men for the war. 

But the^King's w'eakness was already too great to allow of his 
taking the field, and he was forced to intrust the war in the Neth- 
erlands to the one Englishman who had shown himself capable of 
a great command. John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, was born 
in 1650, the son of a Devonshire Cavalier, whose daughter became 
at the Restoration mistress of the Duke of York. The shame of 
Arabella did more, perhaps, than her father's loyalty to win for 
her brother a commission in the Royal Guards ; and after five 
years' service abroad under Turenne, the young captain became 
colonel of an English regiment which w'as retained in the service 
of France. He had already shown some of the qualities of a great 
soldier — an unruffled courage, a bold and venturous temper held 
in check by a cool and serene judgment, a vigilance and capacity 
for enduring fatigue which never forsook him. In later years he 
was known to spend a whole day in reconnoitring, and at Blen- 
heim he remained on horseback for fifteen hours. But courage and 
skill in arms did less for Churchill on his return to the English 
Court than his personal beauty. In the French camp he had been 
known as " the handsome Englishman," and his manners were as 
winning as his person. Even in age his address was almost irre- 
sistible ; "he engrossed the graces," says Chesterfield; and his air 
never lost the indolent sweetness which won the fovor of Lady 
Castlemaine. A present of £5000 from the King's mistress laid 
the foundation of a fortune which grew rapidly to greatness, as the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



681 



prudent forethought of the handsome young soldier hardened into 
the avarice of age. But it was to the Duke of York that Churchill 
looked for advancement, and he eai'ned it by the fidelity with 
which as a member of his household he clung to the Duke's for- 
tunes during the dark days of the Plot. He followed James to 
Edinburgh and the Hague, and was raised to the peerage on his 
return and rewarded with the colonelcy of the Royal Life Guards. 
The service he rendered his master after his accession by saving 
the Royal army from a surprise at Sedgemoor would have been 
yet more splendidly acknowledged but for the King's bigotry. 
In spite of his master's personal solicitations, Churchill remained 
true to Protestantism. But he knew James too well to count on 
further favor ; and no sentiment of gratitude hindered him from 
corresponding with the Prince of Orange, and planning a mutiny 
in the army gathered to oppose him which would have brought 
the King a prisoner into the Prince's camp. His plot broke down, 
but his desertion proved fatal to the Royal cause ; and the service 
Avhich he had rendered to William, base as it was, Avas too price- 
less to miss its reward. Chui'chill became Earl of Marlborough ; 
he was j)ut at the head of a force during the Irish war, where his 
rapid successes at once won William's regard, and he was given 
high command in the army of Flanders, But the treason which 
Marlborough had plotted against James was as nothing when com- 
pared to the treason which he soon plotted against William. Great 
as was his greed of gold, he had married Sarah Jennings, a penni- 
less beauty of Charles's court, in whom a violent and malignant 
temper was strangely combined with a power of winning and re- 
taining love. Marlborough's affection for her ran like a thread of 
gold through the dark web of his career. In the midst of his 
marches and from the very battle-field he writes to his wife with 
the same passionate tenderness. The composure which no danger 
or hatred could rufiie broke down into almost womanish depression 
at the thought of her coldness or at any burst of her violent hu- 
mor. He never left her Avithout a pang. " I did for a great while 
with a perspective glass look upon the clifis," he once wrote to her 
after setting out on a campaign, " in hopes that I might have had 
one sight of you." It was no wonder that the woman who in- 
spired Marlborough with a love like this bound to her the weak 
and feeble nature of the Princess Anne. The two friends threw 
ofl'the restraints of state, and addressed each other as "Mrs. Free- 
man " and " Mrs. Morley." It was through the influence of his 
wife that Churchill induced Anne to desert her father at the Rev- 
olution, and it was on the same influence that his ambition count- 
ed in its designs against William. His plan was simply to drive 
the King from the throne by backing the Tories in their opposi- 
tion to the war, as well as by stirring to frenzy the English hatred 
of foreigners, and to seat Anne in his place. The discovery of his 
designs roused the King to a burst of unusual resentment. " Were 
I and my Lord Marlborough private persons," William exclaimed, 
"the sword would have to settle between us." As it was, he could 
only strip tlie Earl of his ofiices and command, and drive his wife 



682 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



from St. James's. Anne followed her favorite, and the court of 
the Princess became the centre of the Tory opposition ; while 
Marlborough opened a correspondence with James, and went far 
beyond his fellow-traitors in baseness by revealing to him, and 
through him to France, the war projects of the English Cabinet. 

The death of Mary forced William to recall Anne, who had now 
become his successor ; and with Anne the Marlboroughs returned 
to Court. The King could not bend himself to trust the Earl 
again; but as death drew near he saw in hini the one man whose 
splendid talents fitted him, in spite of the baseness and treason of 
his life, to rule England and direct the Grand Alliance in his stead. 
He put Marlborough at the head of the army in Flanders, but the 
Earl had only just taken the command when, on the 20th of Feb- 
ruary, 1 702, a i'all from his horse proved fatal to the broken frame 
of the King. "There was a time when I should have been glad 
to have been delivered out of my troubles," the dying man whis- 
pered to Portland, " but I own I see another scene, and could wish 
to live a little longer." He knew, however, that the wish was 
vain, and commended Marlborough to Anne as the fittest person 
to lead her armies and guide her counsels. Anne's zeal needed no 
quickening. Three days after her accession on the Sth of March, 
the Earl was named Captain-General of the English forces at home 
and abroad, and intrusted with the entire direction of the Avar, 
His supremacy over home affairs was secured by the elevation of 
Lord Godolphin, a skilled financier and a close friend of Marlbor- 
ougli, to the post of Lord Treasurer. The Queen's affection for 
his wife insured him the support of the Crown at a moment when 
Anne's personal popularity gave the Crown a new weight with, 
the nation. In England, indeed, party feeling for the moment died 
away. The Tories were won over to the war now that it was 
waged by a Tory general ; and the Whigs were ready to back 
even a Tory general in waging a Whig war. Abroad, William's 
death shook the Grand Alliance to its base ; and even Holland 
wavered in dread of being deserted by England in the coming 
struggle. But the decision of Marlborough soon did away with 
this "distrust. Anne was made to declare from the throne her re- 
solve to pursue with energy the policy of her predecessor. The 
Tory Parliament Avas brought to sanction vigorous measures for 
the prosecution of the war. The new general hastened to the 
Hague, received the command of the Dutch as well as of the En- 
glish forces, and drew the German powers into the Confederacy 
v/ith a skill and adroitness which even William might have en- 
vied. Never Avas greatness more quickly recognized than in the 
case of Marlborough. In a few months he Avas regarded by all as 
the guiding spirit of tlie Alliance, and princes Avhose jealousy had 
Avorn out the patience of William yielded without a struggle to 
the counsels of his successor. The temper, indeed, of Marlborough 
fitted him in an especial Avay to be the head of a great confeder- 
acy. Like William, he OAved little of his power to any early train- 
ing. The trace of his neglected education Avas seen to the last in 
his reluctance to Avr.te. " Of all things," he said to his Avife, " 1 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



68^ 



do not love writing." To pen a dispatch, indeed, was a far great- 
er trouble to liim than to plan a campaign. But nature bad given 
bim qualities wliich in other men spring specially from culture. 
His capacity for business was immense. During the next ten 
years lie assumed the general direction of tbe war in Flanders and 
in Spain. He managed every negotiation with tbe courts of tbe 
Allies. He watched over tbe shifting phases of English politics. 
He had to cross tbe Channel to win over Anne to a change in the 
Cabinet, or to hurry to Berlin to secure the due contingent of 
Electoral troops from Brandenburg, At the same moment be was 
reconciling tbe Emperor with the Protestants of Hungary, stirring 
the Calvinists of the Cevennes into revolt, arranging tbe affairs of 
Portugal, and providing for the protection of tbe Duke of Savoy. 
But bis air showed no trace of fatigue or haste or vexation. He 
retained to the last the indolent grace of bis youth. His natural 
dignity was never ruffled by aft outbreak of temper. Amid the 
storm of battle men saw him, " without fear of danger or in the 
least hurry, giving bis orders with all the calmness imaginable," 
In the Cabinet he was as cool as on the battle-field. He met with 
the same equable serenity the pettiness of the German princes, 
tbe phlegm of the Dutch, the ignorant opposition of his officers, 
the libels of his political opponents. There was a touch of irony 
in the simple expedients by which he sometimes solved problems 
which had baffled cabinets. Tbe King of Prussia was one of the 
most vexatious among the Allies, but all difficulty with bim ceased 
when Marlborough rose at a state banquet and banded to him a 
naj^kin. Churchill's composure rested j)artly, indeed, on a pride 
/wmcb~could not stoop to bare tbe real self within to the eyes of 
(meaner men. In tbe bitter moments before bis fall be bade Go- 
/ dolphin burn some querulous letters which the persecution of bis 
(opponents bad wrung from bim. "My desire is that tbe world 
j may continue in their error of thinking me a bapj)y man, for I 
vihink it better to be envied than pitied," But in great measure 
it sprang from the purely intellectual temper of his mind. His 
passion for bis wife was the one sentiment which tinged tbe color- 
less light in which his understanding moved. In all else he was 
without love or hate, he knew neither doubt nor regret. In pri- 
vate life he was a humane and compassionate man; but if his po- 
sition required it, be could betray Englishmen to death in bis ne- 
gotiations with St. Germains, or lead his army to a butchery such 
as that of Malplaquet, Of honor or tbe finer sentiments of man- 
kind be knew nothing ; and he turned without a shock from guid- 
ing Europe and winning great victories to heap up a matchless 
fortune by peculation and greed. He is, perhaps, the only instance 
of a man of real greatness who loved money for money's sake. 
The passions which stirred the men around him, Avbether noble or 
ignoble, were to bim simply elements in an intellectual problem 
which bad to be solved by patience, " Patience" will overcome all 
things," be writes again and again, "As I think most things are 
governed by destiny, having done all things we should submit 
with patience." 



684 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



As a statesman, the high qualities of Marlborough were owned 
by his bitterest foes. " Over the Confederacy," says Bolingbroke, 
"he, a new, a private man, acquired by merit and management a 
more decided influence than high birth, confirmed authority, and 
even the crown of Great Britain, had given to King William." 
But great as he was in the council, he was even greater in the 
field. He stands alone among the masters of the art of war as a 
captain whose victories began at an age when the work of most 
men is done. Though he served as a young officer under Turenne 
and for a few months in Ireland and the Netherlands, he had held 
no great command till he took the field in Flanders at the age of 
fifty-two. He stands alone, too, in his unbroken good -fortune, 
Voltaire notes that he never besieged a fortress which he did not 
take, or fought a battle which he did not win. His difiiculties 
came not from the enemy, but from the ignorance and timidity of 
his own allies. He v/as never defeated in the field, but victory 
after victory was snatched from him by the incapacity of his ofii- 
cers or the stubbornness of the Dutch. What startled the cau- 
tious strategists of his day was the vigor and audacity of his plans. 
Old as he was, Marlborough's designs had from the first all the 
dash and boldness of youth. On taking the field in 1702 he at 
once resolved to force a battle in the heart of Brabant. The plan 
was foiled by the timidity of the Dutch deputies; but his resolute 
advance across the Meuse drew the French forces from that river, 
and enabled him to reduce fortress after fortress in a series of 
sieges. The surrender of Liege closed a campaign which cut off 
the French from the Lower Rhine and freed Holland from all dan- 
ger of an invasion. The successes of Marlborough had been brought 
into bolder relief by the fortunes of the war in other quarters. 
In Italy Prince Eugene of Savoy showed his jDOwers by a sur- 
prise of the French army at Cremona, but no real successes had 
been won. An English descent on the Spanish coast ended in fail- 
ure. In Germany the Bavarians joined the French, and the united 
armies defeated the forces of the Empire. It Avas in this quarter 
that Lewis resolved to push his fortunes. In the spring of 1703 a 
fresh army under Marshal Villars again relieved the Elector from 
the pressure of the Imperial armies, and only a strife which arose 
between the two commanders hindered the joint armies from 
marching on Vienna. Meanwhile the timidity of the Dutch dep- 
uties served Lewis well in the Low Countries, Marlborough had 
been created Duke, and munificently rewarded for his services in 
the previous year, but his hopes in this second campaign were 
foiled by the deputies of the States-General, Serene as his tem- 
per was, it broke down before their refusal to co-operate in an 
attack on Antwerp and French Flanders ; and the prayers of Go- 
dolphin and of the pensionary Heinsius alone induced him to 
withdraw his offer of resignation. But in spite of victories on the 
Danube, the blunders of his adversaries on the Rhine, and the sud- 
den aid of an insurrection which broke out in Hungaiy, the difii- 
culties of Lewis were hourly increasing. The accession of Savoy 
to the Grand Alliance threatened his armies in Italy with destruc- 



IXJ 



THE REVOLUTION. 



685 



lion. That of Portugal gave the Allies a base of operations against 
Spain. His energy, however, rose with the pressure, and while the 
Duke of Berwick, a natural son of James the Second, was dis- 
patched against Portugal, three small armies closed around Savoy. 
The flower of the French troops joined the army of Bavaria on 
the Danube, for the bold plan of Lewis was to decide the fortunes 
of the war by a victory which would wrest peace from the Empire 
under the walls of Vienna. 

The master-stroke of Lewis roused Marlborough at the opening 
of 1*704 to a master-stroke in return ; but the secrecy and boldness 
of the Duke's plans deceived both his enemies and his allies. The 
French army in Flanders saw in his march upon Mainz only a 
transfer of the war into Elsass. The Dutch were lured into suf- 
fering their troops to be drawn as far from Flanders as Coblentz 
by proposals of a campaign on the Moselle. It was only when 
Marlborough crossed the Neckar and struck through the heart of 
Germany for the Danube that the true aim of his operations was 
revealed. After struggling through the hill-country of Wlirtem- 
berg, he joined tlie Imperial army under the Prince of Baden, 
stormed the heights of Donauworth, ci'ossed the Danube and the 
Lech, and penetrated into the heart of Bavaria. The crisis drew 
the two armies which wei'e facing one another on the Upper Rhine 
to the scene. The arrival of Marshal Tallard with thirty thousand 
French troops saved the Elector of Bavaria for the moment from 
the need of submission ; but the junction of his opponent. Prince 
Eugene, with Marlborough raised the contending forces again to 
an equality, and after a few marches the armies met on the nortli 
bank of the Danube, near the little town of Hochstadt and the vil- 
lage of Blindheim or Blenheim, which have given their names to 
the battle. In one respect the struggle which followed stands al- 
most xinrivaled in history, for the whole of the Teutonic race was 
represented in the strange medley of Englishmen, Dutchmen, Han- 
overians, Danes, Wilrtembergers, and Austrians who followed Marl- 
borough and Eugene. The French and Bavarians, who numbered 
like their opponents some fifty thousand men, lay behind a little 
streani which ran through swampy ground to the Danube. The 
position was a strong one, for its front was covered by the swamp, 
its right by the Danube, its left by the hill-country in which the 
stream rose ; and Tallard had not only intrenched himself, but was 
far superior to his rival in artillery. But for once Marlborough's 
hands were free. "I have great reason," he wrote calmly home, 
" to hope that every thing will go well, for I have the pleasure to 
find all the officers willing to obey without knowing any other 
reason than that it is my desire, which is very different from what 
it was in Flanders, where I was obliged to have the consent of a 
council of war for every thing I undertook." So formidable were 
the obstacles, however, that though the Allies Avere in motion at 
sunrise on the 13th of August, it was not till midday that Eugene, 
who commanded on the right, succeeded in crossing the stream. 
The English foot at once forded it on the left and attacked the vil- 
lage of Blindheim, in which the biilk of the French infantry were 



68G 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



intrenched ; but after a furious struggle the attack was repulsed, 
while as gallant a resistance at the other end of the line held Eugene 
in check. The centre, however, which the French believed to be un- 
assailable, had been chosen by Marlborough for the chief point of at- 
tack, and by making an artificial road across the morass he was at last 
enabled to throw his eight thousand horsemen on the French horse 
which lay covered by it. Two desperate charges -which the Duke 
headed in person decided the day. The French centre was flung back 
on the Danube and forced to surrender. Their left fell back in con- 
fusion on Hochstadt; their right, cooped up in Blindheim and cut off 
from retreat, became prisoners of war. Of the defeated army only 
twenty thousand escaped. Twelve thousand were slain, fourteen 
thousand were captured. Germany was finally freed from the 
French; and Marlborough, who followed the wreck of the French 
host in its flight to Elsass, soon made himself master of the~"Lower 
Moselle. But the loss of France could not be measured by men or 
fortresses. A hundred victories since Rocroi had taught the world 
to regard the French army as invincible, when Blenheim and the sur- 
render of the flower of the French soldiery broke the spell. From 
that moment the terror of victory passed to the side of the Allies,. 
and "Malbrook" became a name of fear to every child in France. 
In England itself the victory of Blenheim aided to bring about 
a great change in the political aspect of aflairs. With the progress 
of the struggle the Tory party had slowly drifted back again into 
its old antipathy to a " Whig war." Marlborough strove to bind 
them to his policy by supporting in 1702 and 1V03 a bill against 
occasional conformity, which excluded the Nonconformists yet 
more rigidly from all municipal rights, and by allowing the Queen 
to set aside the tenths and first-fruits liitherto paid by the clergy 
to the Crown as a fund for the augmentation of small benefices. 
The fund still bears the name of Queen Anne's Bounty. But the 
bill against occasional conformity was steadily resisted by the 
Lords, and Marlborough's efforts to bend the Tory Ministers to a 
support of the war were every day more fruitless. The higher 
Tories, with Lord Nottingham at their head, who had thrown every 
obstacle they could in the way of its continuance, at last quitted 
office in 1704, and Marlborough replaced them by Tories of a more 
moderate stamp who were still in favor of the war: by Robert 
Harley, who became Secretary of State, and Henry St. John, a man , 
of splendid talents, who was named Secretary of War. The Duke's 
march into Germany embittered the political strife. The Tories 
and Jacobites threatened, if Marlborough failed,, to bring his head 
to the block, and only the victory of Blenheim saved him from 
political ruin. Slowly and against his will the Duke drifted from 
his own party to the party which really backed his policy. He 
availed himself of the national triumph over Blenheim to dissolve 
Parliament ; the elections of 1705, as he hoped, returned a major- 
ity in favor of the war, and the efibrts of Marlborough brought 
about a coalition between the Whig Junto and the moderate To- 
ries who still clung to him which foiled the bitter attacks of the 
peace party. The support of the Whigs was purchased by mak- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



C8^ 



ing a Wiiig, William Cowper, Lord Keeper, and sending Lord Sun- 
derland as Envoy to Vienna. Marlborough at last felt secure at 
home; but he had to bear disappointment abroad. His plan of 
attack along the line of the Moselle was defeated by the refusal 
of the Imperial army to join him. When he entered the French 
lines across the t>yle, the Dutch generals withdrew their troops ; 
and his proposal to attack the Duke of Villeroy in the field of 
Waterloo was rejected in full council of war by the deputies of 
the States with cries of "murder" and "massaci-e." Even Marl- 
borough's composure broke into bitterness at the blow. " Had I 
liad the same power I had last year," he wrote home, "I could 
have won a greater victory than that of Blenheim." On his com- 
plaint the States recalled their commissaries, but the year was lost ; 
nor had greater results been brought about in Italy or on the 
l^hine. The spirits of the Allies were only sustained by the ro- 
mantic exploits of Lord Peterborough in Spain. Profligate, un- 
principled, flighty as he was, Peterborough had a genius for war, 
and his seizure of Barcelona with a handful of men, his recognition 
of the old liberties of Aragon, roused that province to support 
the cause of the second son of the Emperor, who had been 
acknowledged as King of Spain by the Allies under the title of 
Charles the Third. Catalonia and Valentia soon joined Aragon 
in declaring for Charles ; while Marlborough spent the winter of 
1705 in negotiations at Vienna, Berlin, Hanover, and the Hague, 
and in preparations for the coming campaign; Eager for free- 
dom of action, and sick of the Imperial generals as of the Dutch, 
lie planned a march over the Alps and a campaign in Italy; and 
though his designs were defeated by the opposition of the Al- 
lies, he found himself unfettered when he again appeared in Flan- 
ders in 1706. Villeroy was as eager as Marlborough for an en- 
gagement ; and the two armies met on the 23d of May at the vil- 
lage of Ramillies, on the undulating plain which forms the highest 
ground in Brabant. The French were drawn up in a wide curve, 
with morasses covering their front. After a feint on their left, 
Marlborough flung himself on their right wing at Ramillies, crush- 
ed it in a brilliant charge that he led in person, and swept along 
their whole line till it broke in a rout which only ended beneath 
the w^alls of Louvain. In an hour and a half the French. had lost 
fifteen thousand men, their baggage and their guns, and the line 
of the Scheldt, Brussels, Antwerp, and Bruges was the prize of the 
victors. It only needed the four successful sieges which followed 
the battle of RamilUes to complete the deliverance of Flanders. 

The year which witnessed the victory of Ramillies remains yet 
more memorable as the year which witnessed the final Union of 
England with Scotland. As the undoing of the earlier union had 
been the first work of the Government t)f the Restoration, its re- 
vival was one of the first aims of the Government which followed 
the Revolution. But the project was long held in check by re- 
ligious and commercial jealousies. Scotland refused to bear any 
part of the English debt, England would not yield any share in 
her monojioly of trade with the Colonies. The English Church- 

44 



()S8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



men longed for a restoration of Episcopacy north of the Border, 
while the Scotch Presbyterians would not hear even of the legal 
toleration of Episcopalians. In 1703, however, the Act of Settle- 
ment w^iich passed through the Scotch Parliament at last brought 
home to English statesmen the dangers of further delay. In deal- 
ing with this measure the Scotch Whigs, who cared only for the 
independence of their country, joined hand in hand with the Scotch 
Jacobites, who looked only to the interests of the Pretender. The 
Jacobites excluded from the Act the name of the Princess Sophia ; 
the Whigs introduced a provision that no sovereign of England 
should be recognized as sovereign of Scotland save upon security 
given to the religion, freedom, and trade of the Scottish people. 
Great as the danger arising from such a measure undoubtedly was, 
for it pointed to a recognition of the Pretender in Scotland on the 
Queen's death, and such a recognition meant war between Scot- 
land and England, it was only after three years' delay that the 
wisdom and resolution of Lord Somers brought the question to an 
issue. The Scotch proposfils of a federative rather than a legisla- 
tive union were set aside by his firmness; the commercial jealous- 
ies of the English traders were put by; and the Act of Union as 
finally passed in 1707 provided that the two kingdoms should be 
united into one under the name of Great Britain, and that the suc- 
cession to the crown of this United Kingdom should be ruled by 
the provisions of the English Act of Settlement. The Scotch 
Church and the Scotch Law were left untouched ; but all rights of 
trade were thrown open, and a uniform system of coinage adopted. 
A single Parliament was henceforth to represent the United King- 
dom, and for this purpose forty-five Scotch members were added 
to the five hundred and thirteen English members of the House of 
Commons, and sixteen i-epresentative peers to the one hundred and 
eight who formed the English House of Lords. In Scotland the 
opposition was bitter and almost universal. The terror of the 
Presbyterians, indeed, was met by an Act of Security which became 
part of the Treaty of Union, and which required an oath to sup- 
port the Presbyterian Church from every sovereign on his acces- 
sion. But no securities could satisfy the enthusiastic patriots or 
the fanatical Cameronians. The Jacobites sought troops from 
France and plotted a Stuart restoration. The Nationalists talked 
of seceding from the Assembly which voted for the Union, and of 
establishing a rival Parliament. In the end, however, good-sense 
and the loyalty of the trading classes to the cause of the Protest- 
ant succession won their way. The measure jf\'as adopted hj the 
Scotch Parliament, and the Treaty of Union became in 1707 a leg- 
islative Act to which Anne gave her assent in noble words. "I 
desire," said the Queen, "and expect from my subjects of both na- 
tions that from henceforth they act with all possible respect and 
kindness to one another, that so it may appear to all the world 
they have hearts disposed to become one people." Time has more 
than answered these hopes. The two nations whom the Union 
brought together have ever since remained one. England gained 
in the removal of a constant dano-er of treason and war. To Scot- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



689 



land the Union opened up new avenues of wealth which the energy 
of its people turned to wonderful account. The farms of Lothian 
have become models of agricultural skill. A fishing-town on the 
Clyde has grown into the rich and populous Glasgow. Peace and 
culture have changed the wild clansmen of the Highlands into 
herdsmen and farmers. Nor was the change followed by any loss 
of national spirit. The world has hardly seen a mightier and more 
rapid development of national energy than that of Scotland after 
the Union. All that passed away was the jealousy Avhich had part- 
ed since the days of Edward the First two peoples whom a com- 
mon blood and common speech proclaimed to be one. The Union 
between Scotland and England has been real and stable simply 
because it was the legislative acknowledgment and enforcement 
of a national fact. 

With the defeat of Ramillies the fortunes of France reached 
their lowest ebb. The loss of Flanders was followed by the loss 
of Italy after a victory by which Eugene relieved Turin ; and not 
only did Peterborough hold his ground in Spain, but Charles the 
Third with an army of English and Portuguese entered Madrid. 
Marlborough was at the height of his renown. Ramillies gave 
him strength enough to force Anne, in spite of her hatred of the 
Whigs, to fulfill his compact Avith them by admitting Lord Sun- 
derland, the bitterest leader of their party, to oflice. But the sys- 
tem of political balance which he had maintained till now was 
fast breaking down. Constitutionally, Marlborough's was the last 
attempt to govern England on other terms than those of j^arty 
government, and the union of parties to which he had clung ever 
since his severance from the extreme Tories soon became impos- 
sible. The growing opposition of the Tories to the war threw the 
Duke more and more on the support of the Whigs, and the Whigs 
sold their support dearly. Sunderland was resolved to drive the 
raodei'ate Tories from the Administration in spite of Marlborough's 
desire to retain them. " England," the Duke wrote hotly, " will 
not be ruined because a few men are not pleased," but the opjjo- 
sition of the Tories to the war left him helpless in the hands of the 
only party who steadily supported it. A factious union of the 
Whigs with their opponents roused Marlborough to a burst of un- 
usual passion in Parliament, but it eiFected its end by convincing 
him of the impossibility of a further resistance. The resistance of 
the Queen, indeed, was stubborn and bitter. Anne was at heart a 
Tory, and her old trust in Marlborough died Avith his acceptance 
of the Whig demniids. It was only by the threat of resignation 
that he had forced her to admit Sunderland to ofiice. The violent 
outbreak of temper with Avhich the Duchess enforced her husband's 
will changed the Queen's friendship for her into a bitter resent- 
ment. Marlborough, however, Avas forced to increase this resent- 
ment by fresh compliances with the Whig demands, by removing 
Peterborough from his command as a Tory general, and by Avrest- 
ing from Anne her consent, in 1708, to the dismissal of Harley and 
St. John from office, and the admission of Lord Somers and Whar- 
ton into the Ministrv. Somers became President of the Council, 



690 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Wharton Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and the Wljig victory M-as 
complete. Meanwhile the great struggle abroad was going on, 
with striking alternations of success. Fi-ance rose with singular 
rapidity from the crushing blow of Ramillies. Spain was recov- 
ered for Philip by the victory of Marshal Berwick at Almanza. 
Yillars won fresh triumphs on the Rhine, and Eugene, who had 
penetrated into Provence, was driven back into Italy. In Flanders, 
the plans of Marlborough were foiled by the strategy of the Duke 
of Vendome and by the reluctance of the Dutch, who were now 
wavering toward peace. In the campaign of 1708, however, Ven- 
dome, though superior in force, was attacked and defeated at Ou- 
denarde ; and though Marlborough w^as hindered from striking at 
the heart of France by the timidity of the English and Dutch 
statesmen, he reduced Lille, the strongest of the frontier fortresses, 
in the face of an army of relief which numbered a hundred thou- 
sand men. The pride of Lewis was at last bioken by defeat and 
by the terrible suffering of France. He offei-ed terms of peace 
which yielded all that the Allies had fought for. He consented to 
withdraw his aid from Philip of Spain, to give up ten Flemisli 
fortresses to the Dutch, and to surrender to the Empire all that 
France had gained since the Treaty of Westphalia. He offered to 
acknowledge Anne, to banish the Pretender from his dominions, 
and to demolish the fortifications of Dunkirk, a port hateful to 
England as the home of the French privateers. 

To Marlborough peace now seemed secure, but in spite of his 
counsels the Allies and the Whig Ministers in England demanded 
that Lewis should Avith his own troops comj)el his grandson to 
give up the crown of Spain. "If I must wage war," replied the 
King, " I had rather wage it against my enemies than against my 
children." At the opening of the campaign of 1709 he appealed to 
France, and France, exhausted as it was, answered nobly to his ap- 
peal. The terrible slaughter which bears the name of the battle of 
Malplaquet showed a new temper in the French soldiery. Starving 
as they were, they flung away their rations in their eagerness for the 
fight, and fell back at its close in serried masses that no efforts of 
Marlborough could break. They had lost twelve thousand men, 
but they had inflicted on the Allies a loss of double that number. 
A "deluge of blood" such as that of Malplaquet increased the 
growing weariness of the war, and the rejection of the French of- 
fers w\as unjustly attributed to a desire on the part of Marlborougli 
of lengthening out a contest which brought him profit and power. 
The expulsion of Ilarley and St. John from the J^Iinistry had given 
the Tories leaders of a more vigorous stamp, and St. John brought 
into play a nevs^ engine of political attack whose powers soon made 
themselves felt. In the JExaminer,n.\\^ in a crowd of pamphlets 
and periodicals which followed in its train, tlie humor of Prior, the 
bitter irony of Swift, and St. John's own brilliant sophistry spent 
themselves on the abuse of the war and of its general. " Six mill- 
ions of supplies and almost fifty millions of debt !" Swift wrote 
bitterly, " The High Allies have been the ruin of us !" Marlbor- 
ough was ridiculed and reviled ; he was accused of insolence, cruel- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



691 



ty and ambition, of corruption and greed. Even his courage was 
called in question. A sudden storm of popular passion showed the 
way in which public opinion responded to these efforts. A High- 
Church divine, Dr. Sacheverell, maintained the doctrine of non-re- 
sistance in a sermon at St. Paul's with a boldness which deserved 
prosecution; but in spite, of the warning of Marlborough and of 
Somers the Whig Ministers resolved on his impeachment. His 
trial in 1*710 at once widened into a great party struggle, and the 
popular enthusiasm in Sacheverell's favor showed the gathering 
hatred of the Whigs and the war. The most eminent of the Tory 
Churchmen stood by his side at the bar, crowds escorted him to 
the court and back again, while the streets rang with cries of 
" The Church and Dr. Sacheverell." A small majority of the peers 
found him guilty, but the light sentence they inflicted was in ef- 
fect an acquittal, and bonfires and illuminations over the whole 
country welcomed it as a Tory triumph. 

The turn of popular feeling freed Anne at once from the press- 
ure beneath Avhich she had bent; and the skill of Harley, whose 
cousin, Mrs. Masham, had succeeded the Duchess of Marlborough 
in the Queen's favor, was employed in bringing about the fall both 
of Marlborough and the Whig Ministers by playing the one off 
against the other. The Whigs, who knew the Duke's alliance with 
the ax had simply been forced on him by the Avar, and Avere per- 
suaded that the Queen had no aim but to humble him, looked cool- 
ly on at the dismissal of his son-in-laAv, Sunderland, and his friend, 
Godolphin. Marlborough, who leaned toward a reconciliation 
Avith his old party, looked on in return while Anne dismissed the 
Whig Ministers in the autumn of 1*710, and appointed a Tory Min- 
istry in their place Avith Harley and St. John at its head. In the 
face of these changes, hoAvever, the Duke did not dare to encoun- 
ter the risks of any decisive enterpi'ise ; and his reduction of a fcAV 
sea-board tOAvns failed to Avin back English feeling to the continu- 
ance of so costly a struggle. The return of a Tory House of Com- 
mons sealed his fate. His Avife was dismissed from court. A mas- 
terly plan for a march into the heart of France in the opening of 
1*711 Avas foiled by the Avithdrawal of a part of his forces, and the 
negotiations Avhich had for some time been conducted betAveen the 
French and English Ministers Avithout his knowledge marched rap- 
idly to a close. The sense of approaching ruin forced Marlborough 
at last to break Avith the Tory Ministry, and his efforts induced the 
House of Lords to denounce the contemplated peace; but the sup- 
port of the Commons and the Queen, and the general hatred of the 
Avar among the people, enabled Harley to ride doAvn all resistance. 
At the opening of 1712 the Whig majority of the House of Lords 
Avas swamped by the creation of tAvelve Tory peers. Marlborough 
wa^ dismissed from his command, charged with peculation, and 
condemned as guilty by a vote of the House of Commons. He at 
once withdrew from England, and Avith his withdraAval all opposi- 
tion to the peace was at an end. 



Seo. IX. 
Map.i.- 

BOEODGH. 

1698- 

1712. 



Fall of 
Marl- 
borough. 



692 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Section X.-^Falpole. 1712-1742. 

[^Authorities. — Coxe's Life of Sir Robert Walpole, Horace Walpole's Memoirs of 
the Reign of George II., and Lord Hervey's amusing Memoirs from the accession 
of George II. to the death of Qaeen Carohne ; the poHtical tracts, and especially the 
Letter to Sir WiUiam Wyndham and the Patriot King, ofBohngbroke, with the Bol- 
ingbroke CoiTespondence ; Swift's poHtical writings, and his Journal to Stella. Hor- 
ace Walpole's Letters to Sir Horace Mann give a minute account of his fiither's 
fall. A sober and judicious account of the whole period may he found in Lord Stan- 
hope's History of England from the Peace of Utrecht.] 



The struggle of tlie House of Lords under Marlborough's guid- 
ance Qo-ainst Harley and the Peace marks the close of the constitu- 
tional revolution which had been silentl^y going on since the res- 
toration of the Stuarts. The defeat of the Peers and the fall of 
Marlborough which followed it announced that the transfer of po- 
litical power to the House of Commons mms complete. The ma- 
chinery by which Sunderland had enabled it to direct the actual 
o-overnment of the country had been strengthened by the failure 
of Marlborough to restore the older system of administration ; 
and the Ministers of the Crown have remained ever since an Exec- 
utive Committee whose work is to carry out the will of the major- 
ity of its members. A recognition of this great change was seen 
in the series of " Great Commoners " who from this time became 
the rulers of England. The influence of political tradition, of 
wealth, and of the administrative training which their position 
often secures them, has at all times given places in the Ministry to 
members of the House of Lords, and a peer has sometimes figured 
as its nominal head. But the more natural arrangement has been 
the more common one ; and all the greater statesmen who have 
guided the fortunes of England since Harley's day have been found 
in the Commons. Of these Great Commoners Robert Walpole 
was the first. Born in 1676, he entered Parliament two years be- 
fore William's death as a young jSTorfolk landowner of fair for- 
tune, with the tastes and air of the class from which he sprang. 
His big square figure, his vulgar, good-humored i;ice, were those of 
a common country squire. And in Walpole the squire underlay 
the statesman to the last. He was ignorant of books, he "loved 
neither writing nor reading," and if he had a taste for art, his real 
love was for the table, the bottle, and the chase. He rode as hard 
as he drank. Even in moments of political peril, the first dispatch 
he would open was the letter from his gamekeeper. There was 
the temper of the Xorfolk fox-hunter in the " doggedness'' which 
Marlborough noted as his characteristic; in the burly self-confi- 
dence whicli declared, "If I had not been Prime Minister, I should 
have been Archbishop of Canterbury ;" in the stubborn courage 
which conquered the awkwardness of his earlier efforts to speak, or 
met single-handed at the last the bitter attacks of a host of ene- 
mies ; and, above all, in the genial good-humor wdiich became with 
him a new force iu politics. Walpole was the first Minister — it 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



69lt 



has been finely said — " who gave our government that character 
of lenity which it has since generally deserved." No man was ever 
more fiercely attacked by speakers and writers, but he brought in 
no " gagging Act " for the press ; and though the lives of most 
of his assaihants were in his hands through their intrigues with 
the Pretender, he made no use of his power over them. Where 
his country breeding showed itself most, however, was in the 
shrewd, narrow, honest character of his mind. He saw very clear- 
ly, but he could not see far, and he would not believe what he 
could not see. He was thoroughly straightforward and true to 
his own convictions, so far as they went, " Robin and I are two 
honest men," the Jacobite Shippen owned in later years, when 
contrasting him with his factious opponents ; " he is for King 
George, and I am for King James ; but those men with long cra- 
vats only desire place, either under King George or King James," 
He saw the value of the political results which the Revolution had 
won, and he carried out his "Revolution principles" with a rare 
fidelity through years of unquestioned power. But his prosaic 
good-sense turned skeptically away from the poetic and passion- 
ate sides of human feeling. Appeals to the loftier or purer mo- 
tives of action he laughed at as "schoolboy flights." For young 
members who talked of j)ublic virtue or patriotism he had one good- 
natured answer: "You will soon come off that and grow wiser." 
How great a part Walpole was to play no one could as yet fore- 
see. But even under Marlborough his practical abilities had brought 
him to the front. At the moment when the House of Commons 
was recognized as supreme, Walpole showed himself its ablest de- 
bater. Commerce promised to become the main interest of En- 
gland, and the merchants were already beginning to trust to his 
skill in finance. As a subordinate member of the Whig Ministry 
at the close of the war he gave signs of that administrative abil- 
ity which forced his enemies to acknowledge that "he does every 
thing witii the same ease and tranquillity as if he were doing noth- 
ing." How great was the sense of his power was seen in the ac- 
tion of the triumphant Tories on Marlborough's fall in 1712. Wal- 
pole alone of their Whig opponents w^as singled out for persecu- 
tion ; and a groundless charge of peculation sent him for a time 
to the Tower. The great work of the new Tory Ministry was to 
bring about a peace, and by the conclusion of a separate truce with 
France it at last forced all the members of the Alliance save the 
Emperor, who required the pressure of defeat, to consent in 1V13 
to the Treaty of Utrecht. In this treaty the original aim of the 
war was silently abandoned, and the principle of the earlier Trea- 
ties of Partition adopted in its stead, but with a provision that the 
crowns of France and Spain should never be united, Philip re- 
mained on the Spanish throne ; Spain ceded her possessions in It- 
aly and the Netherlands to Cliarles, who had now become Emper- 
or, in satisfiiction of his claims; and handed over Sicily to the 
Duke of Savoy, Holland regained the right of placing garrisons 
in the strongest towns of the Netherlands as a barrier against 
France. England retained her conquests of Minorca and Gibral- 



694 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



tar, Avbich gave her command of the Mediterranean ; her resent- 
ment against the Frencli privateers was satisfied by the dismant- 
ling of Dunkirk; and Lewis recognized the right of Anne and the 
Protestant succession in the House of PTanover. The failure of the 
Queen's health made the succession the real question of the day, 
and it Avas a question which turned all politics into faction and 
intrigue. The Whigs, to secure the succession of the House of 
Hanover by the overthrow of the Tories, defeated a treaty of 
commerce in which Bolingbroke anticipated the greatest financial 
triumph of William Pitt by securing freedom of trade between 
England and France. The PJinistry, on the other hand, in their 
anxiety to strengthen themselves by binding the Church to their 
I side, pushed through the House a Schism Act, which forbade Dis- 
Vjenters to act as schoolmasters and tutors. But on the question 
of the Succession their course was as hesitating as that of the 
Queen, who hated the House of Hanover, and hindered the Elec- 
toral Prince from coming over to secure the rights of his grand- 
mother Sophia by taking his seat among the peers as Duke of 
Cambridge, but who was too loyal to the Church to be brought 
into any real support of the Pretender. Harley, who had become 
Earl of Oxford, intrigued with both Hanover and St. Germains. 
St. John, however, who was raised to the i^eerage as Viscount Bol- 
ingbroke, saw that hesitation Avas no longer possible, and flung him- 
self hotly, though secretly, into the Jacobite cause. As the crisis 
grew nearer, both parties prepared for civil war. In the beginning 
of 1714 the Whigs made ready for a rising on the Queen's death, 
and invited Marlborough from Flanders to head them, in the hope 
that his name would rally the army to their cause. Bolingbroke, 
on the other hand, ousted Harley from office, made the Jacobite 
Duke of Ormond Warden of the Cinque Ports, the district in which 
either claimant of the crown must land, and gave Scotland in 
charge to the Jacobite Earl of Mar. But events moved faster than 
his plans. On the 30th of July Anne was suddenly struck with apo- 
plexy ; and at the news the Whig Dukes of Argyle and Somerset 
entered the Privy Council without summons, and found their cause 
supported by the Duke of Shrewsbury, a member ofthe Tory Min- 
istry, but an adherent ofthe House of Hanover. Shrewsbury was 
suggested by the Council and accepted by the dying Queen as 
Lord Treasurer. Four regiments were summoned to the capital, 
but the Jacobites were hopeless and unprepared, and the Elector 
George of Hanover, who had become heir to the throne on the 
death of the Princess Soj)hia, was proclaimed King without oppo- 
sition. 

The accession of George L in August, 1714, was followed by two 
striking political results. Under Anne the throne had regained 
much of the older influence which it lost through William's un- 
popularity. Under the two sovereigns who followed Anne the 
power of the Crown lay absolutely dormant. They Avere stran- 
gers, to whom loyalty in its personal sense Avas imjDOSsible ; and 
their character as nearly approached insignificance as it is possi- 
ble for human character to approach it. Both were honest and 



IX.} 



THE REVOLUTION. 



695 



straightforward men, who frankly accepted the irksome position 
of constitutional kings. But neither had any qualities which could 
make their honesty attractive to the people at large. The temper 
of the first was that of a gentleman usher ; and his one care was 
to get money for his favorites and himself The temper of the sec- 
ond was that of a drill-sergeant, who believed himself master of his 
realm while he repeated the lessons he had learned from his wife, 
and which his wife had learned from the Minister. Their Court is 
familiar enough in the witty memoirs of the time ; but as political 
figures the^^vo Georges are simply absent from our history. En- 
gland was governed by the Ministers of the Crown, and through- 
out the whole period these were mere representatives of a single 
political party. "The Tory party," Bolingbroke wrote immedi- 
ately after Anne's death, " is gone." It was Bolingbroke more 
than any other man who laad ruined the Tories by diverting them 
from any practical part in English politics to dreams of a Stuart 
restoration. The discovery of the Jacobite plots which had been 
nursed by the late Ministers of the Queen alienated the bulk of 
the landed gentry, who were still loyal to the Revolution, of the 
clergy, who dreaded a Catholic King, and of the trading classes, 
who shrank from the blow to public credit which a Jacobite repu- 
diation of the debt would bring about. The cry of the York mob 
at the King's accession expressed tersely the creed of the English 
trader; it shouted, "Liberty, Property, and No Pretender." The 
policy of Harley and Bolingbroke left the Whigs the only repre- 
sentatives of Revolution principles, of constitutional liberty, and 
religious toleration ; and when this was fairly seen, not only mer- 
chant and squire, but the nation at large went with the Whigs. 
In the House of Commons, after George the First's accession, the 
Tory members hardly numbered fifty, and their Jacobite leanings 
left them powerless over English politics. The King's Ministry 
■was wholly drawn from the Whig party, though Marlborough and 
the leaders of the Junto were to their surprise set aside, and the 
chief oifices given to younger men. The direction of affairs was 
really intrusted to Lord Townshend, who became Secretary of 
State, and his brother-in-law, Walpole, M'ho successively occupied 
the posts of Paymaster of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
and First Lord of the Treasury. The Townshend Administration 
was the first of a series of Whig Ministries which ruled England 
for half a century without any serious opposition. The length of 
their rule was due partly no doubt to an excellent organization. 
While their adversaries were divided by differences of principle 
and without leaders of real eminence, the Whigs stood as one man 
on the principles of the Revolution, and produced great leaders 
who carried them into effect. They submitted with admirable 
discipline to the guidance of a knot of great landed proprietors — to 
the houses of Bentinck, Manners, Campbell, and Cavendish, to the 
Fitzroys and Lennoxes, the Russells and Grenvilles, families wliose 
resistance to the Stuarts, whose share in the Revolution, whose 
energy in setting the line of Hanover on the throne, gave them a 
claim to power which their sober use of it long maintained with- 



696 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



out dispute. They devoted themselves with immense activity to 
the gaining and preserving an ascendency in the House of Com- 
mons. The wealth of the Whig houses was ungrudgingly spent 
in securing a monopoly of the small and corrupt constituencies 
which formed a large part of the borough representation. Of the 
county members, who were the weightier and more active part of 
the House, nine tenths were for a long time relatives and depend- 
ents of the Whig families. The support of the commercial classes 
and of the great towns was won not only by the resolute main- 
tenance of public credit, but by the devotion of a special attention 
to questions of trade and finance. But, dexterous as was their 
management, and compact as was their organization, it was to no- 
bler qualities than these that the Whigs owed their long rule over 
England. They were true throughout to the principles on which 
they had risen into power, and their unbroken administration con- 
verted those principles into national habits. Before the fifty years 
of.their rule had passed, Englishmen had forgotten that it was pos- 
sible to persecute for difi^erences of religion, or to put down the 
liberty of the press, or to tamper with the administration of jus- 
tice, or to rule without a Parliament. With the steadiness of a 
great oligarchy, the Whigs combined, no doubt, its characteristic 
immobility. The tone of their administration was conservative, 
cautious, and inactive. They were firm against any return to the 
past, but they shrank from any advance toward a new and more 
liberal future. "I am no reformer," Walpole used to say, and the 
years of his power are years without parallel in our history for po- 
litical stagnation. .But for the time this inactivity not only saved 
them from great dangers, but fell in with the temper of the nation^ 
at large. Their great stumbling-blocks as a party since the Rev- 
olution had been the War and the Church. But they had learned 
to leave the Church alone, and their foreign policy became a poli- 
cy of peace. At home their inaction Avas especially popular with 
the one class who commonly press for political activity. The en- 
ergy of the trading class was absorbed for tlie time in the i-aj^id 
extension of commerce and the rapid accumulation of wealth. So 
long as the country was justly and constitutionally governed they 
were content to leave government to the hands that held it. They 
wished only to be let alone to enjoy their new freedom, to develop 
their new industries. And the Whigs let them alone. Progress 
became material rather than political, but the material progress of 
the country was such as England had never seen before. 

The conversion of England to the Whigs was hastened by a des- 
perate attempt of the Pretender to gain the throne. There was 
no real hope of success, for the Jacobites in England were few, and 
the Tories were broken and dispirited by the fall of their leaders. 
Lord Oxford was impeached and sent to the Tower; while Boling- 
broke fled over-sea at the threat of impeachment, and was followed 
by the Duke of Ormond, the great hope of the Jacobite party. 
But James Stuart Avas as inaccessible to reason as his fatl'.ei- liad 
been, and in spite of Bolingbroke's counsels he ordered tlie Earl of 
Mar to G'ive the sifmal for revolt in the North. In Scotland the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



697 



triumph of the Whigs meant the continuance of the House of Ar- 
gyle in power, and the rival Highland clans were as ready for a 
blow at the Campbells under Mar as they had been ready for a 
blow at them under Dundee or Montrose, But Mar was a leader 
of different stamp from these. Six thousand Highlanders joined 
him at Perth, but his cowardice and want of conduct kept his army 
idle till Argyle had gathered forces to meet it in an indecisive en- 
gagement at Sheriffmuir. The Pretender, who arrived too late 
for the action, proved a yet more sluggish and incapable leader 
than Mar; and at the close of 11l?> the advance of fresh forces 
drove James over-sea again, and dispersed the clans to their hills. 
In England, the danger passed away like a dream. A few of the 
Catholic gentry rose in Northumberland, nnder Lord Derwent- 
water and Mr. Forster; and the arrival of two thousand High- 
landers who had been sent to join them by Mar spurred them to a 
march into Lancashire, Avhere the Catholic party was strongest. 
But they were soon cooped up in Preston, and driven to a cow- 
ardly surrender. The leaders paid for their treason with their 
heads ; but no serious steps were taken to put an end to the dan- 
ger from the north by bringing the clans into order. The Ministry, 
which was reconstituted at the end of 1716 by the withdrawal of 
Townshend and Walpole, and now acknowledged Lord Stanhope 
as its head, availed itself of the Whig triumph to bring about a 
repeal of the Schism and Occasional Conformity Acts, and to vent- 
ure with varying success on two constitutional changes. Under 
the Triennial Bill of William's reign the duration of a Parliament 
was limited to three years. Now that the House of Commons, 
however, was become the ruling power in the State, a change was 
absolutely required to secure steadiness and fixity of political ac- 
tion ; and in 1716 the duration of Parliament was extended to 
seven years by the Septennial Bill. The power which Harley's 
creation of twelve peers showed the Crown to possess of swamp- 
ing the majority in the House of Peers prompted the Ministry iu 
1720 to introduce a bill, Avhose origin was attributed to Lord Sun- 
derland, and which professed to secure the liberty of that House 
by limiting the Peerage to its present number in England, and sub- 
stituting twenty-five hereditary for the sixteen elected Peers from 
Scotland. The bill was strenuously opposed by Walpole, who had 
withdrawn from the Ministry on the expulsion of his friend, Lord 
Townshend, from ofiice ; and to Walpole's opposition it mainly 
owed its defeat. It would, in fact, have rendered representative 
government impossible ; for representative government, as we have 
seen, had come to mean government by the will of the House of 
Commons, and had Sunderland's bill passed no power would have 
been left which could have forced the Peers to bow to the will of the 
Lower House in matters where their opinion was adverse to it. 

Abroad the Whigs aimed strictly at the maintenance of peace 
by a faithful adhesion to the Treaty of Utrecht. The one obsta- 
cle to peace was Spain. Its king, Philip of Anjou, had ceded the 
Italian possessions of his crown and renounced his own rights of 
succession to the throne of France, but his constant dream was to 



698 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



recover all he had given up. To attempt this was to defy Europe ; 
for Austria held the late possessions of Spain in Italy — the Milanese 
and Naples — while France, since the death of Lewis the Fourteenth 
(Sept., 1*715), was ruled by the Regent Duke of Orleans, who stood 
next under the treaty in succession to the French throne throu_o-h 
Philip's renunciation. But the boldness of Cardinal Alberoni, who 
was now the Spanish Minister, accepted the risk. He began to in- 
trigue against the Regent in France, and supported the Jacobite 
cause as a means of preventing the interference of England with 
his designs. He gained the aid of Sweden through the resent- 
ment of Chai'les the Twelfth at the cession to Hanover of the 
Swedish possessions of Bremen and Yerden by the King of Den- 
mark, who had seized them while Charles was absent in Turkey, 
a cession of the highest importance to the Electoral dominions, 
which were thus brought into contact with the sea, and of hardly 
less value to England, as it secured the mouths of the Elbe and 
the Weser — the chief inlets for British commerce into Germany 
— to a friendly state. But the efforts of Alberoni were foiled by 
the union of his opponents. His first attempt was to recover 
the Italian provinces which Philip had lost, and armaments greater 
than Spain had seen for a century reduced Sardinia in 1716, and 
attacked Sicily. England and France at once drew together, and 
were joined by Holland in a Triple Alliance, concluded in the open- 
ing of 1*717, and which guaranteed the succession of the House 
of Hanover in England, as well as of the House of Orleans in 
France, should its boy king, Lewis the Fifteenth, die without issue. 
The Triple Alliance became a Quadruple Alliance in 1718 by the 
accession of the Emperor, whose Italian possessions the three 
Powers had guaranteed; and the appearance of an English squad- 
ron in the Strait of Messina was followed by an engagement in 
which the Spanish fleet was all but destroyed. Alberoni strove 
to avenge the blow by fitting out an armament which the Duke 
of Ormond was to command for the revival of the Jacobite ris- 
ing in Scotland, but his fleet was wrecked in the Bay of Biscay ; 
and the progress of the French armies in the north of Spain forced 
Philip at last to dismiss his Minister, to renew his renunciation of 
the French throne, and to withdraw from Sardinia and Sicily, on 
condition that the reversion of Parma and Tuscany should be se- 
cured to his son, the Infante Don Carlos. Sicily now passed to 
the Emperor, and Savoy was recompensed for its loss by the ac- 
quisition of Sardinia, from which its Duke took the title of King. 
At the same moment the schemes of Charles the Twelfth, who had 
concluded an alliance with the Czar, Peter the Great, for a resto- 
ration of the Stuarts, were brought to an end by his death at the 
siege of Frederickshall. But the ability and sense which Stan- 
hope and his fellow Ministers showed in their foreign policy ut- 
terly failed them in dealing with the power of speculation which 
the sudden increase of commerce was rousing at home. The un- 
known wealth of South America had acted ever since the days 
of the Buccaneers like a spell on the imagination of Englishmen ; 
and Harley gave countenance to a South Sea Company, which 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



699 



promised a reduction of the public debt as tlie price of a monop- 
oly of the Spanish trade. Spain, however, clunc^ jealously to her 
old prohibitions of all foreign commerce ; the Treaty of Utrecht 
only won for England the right of engaging in the negro slave- 
trade, and of dispatching a single ship to the coast ; but, in spite 
of all this, the Company again came forward, oflfering in exchange 
for new privileges to pay off national burdens which amounted 
to nearly a million a year. It was in vain that Walpole warned 
the Ministry and the country against this "dream." Both went 
mad; and in 1'720 bubble company followed bubble company, 
till the inevitable reaction brought a general ruin in its train. 

The crash brought Stanhope to the grave. Of his colleagues, 
many were found to have received bribes from the South Sea 
Company to back its frauds. Craggs, the Secretary of State, 
died of terror at the investigation ; Aislabie, the Chancellor of 
the Exchequer, was sent to the Tower; and in the general wreck 
of his rivals Walpole mounted again into power. His factious 
conduct when out of office had been redeemed by his opposition 
to the Peerage Bill ; his weight with the country dates from his 
prescient warnings against the South Sea speculation. In 1721 
he again became First Lord of the Treasury, while Townshend 
returned to his jaost of Secretary of State. But there was noth- 
ing to promise the longest tenure of power which any English 
Minister since the Revolution has ever enjoyed, for Walpole re- 
mained at the head of affairs for twenty-one years. But his long- 
administration is almost without a history. All legislative and 
political activity abruptly ceased with his entry into office. Tear 
after year passed by without a change. In the third year of his 
Ministry there was but one division in the House of Commons. 
The Tory members were so few that for a time they hardly 
cared to attend its sittings; and in 1722 the loss of Bishop At- 
terbury of Rochester, who was convicted of correspondence with 
the Pretender, deprived of his bishopric, and banished by Act of 
Parliament, deprived the Jacobite party of their only remaining 
leader. But quiet as was the air of English politics under Wal- 
pole, his policy was in the main a large and noble one. He was 
the first and greatest of our Peace Ministers. " The most per- 
nicious circumstances," he said, "in which this country can be 
are those of war ; as we must be losers while it lasts and can not 
be great gainers when it ends." In spite of the complications of 
foreign affairs and the pressure from the Court and Opposition, 
he resolutely kept England at peace. It was not that tlie honor 
or influence of England suffered in Walpole's hands, for he won 
victories by the firmness of his policy and the skill of his nego- 
tiations as eflectual a? those which are won by arms. The most 
pressing danger to European tranquillity lay in the fact that the 
Emperor Charles the Sixtli was Avithout a son. He had issued a 
Pragmatic Sanction, by which he provided that his liereditary 
dominions in Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia should descend un- 
broken to his daughter, Maria Theresa ; but the European pow- 
ers had as yet declined to guarantee her succession. Spain, how- 



700 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ever, anxious as of old to recover Gibraltar and Minorca from En- 
gland, and still irritated against France, offered not only to waive 
her own claims and guarantee the Pragmatic Sanction, but to 
grant the highest trading privileges in her American dominions 
to a commercial trading comjsany which the Emj^eror had estab- 
lished at Ostend in deiiance of the Treaty of Westphalia and the 
remonstrances of England and Holland, on condition that the 
Emperor secured the succession of Carlos, Philip's second son, 
to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany, At the same time, Rus- 
sia, which was now governed by Catharine, the wife of Peter 
the Great, forced Sweden into an alliance for an attack upon 
Denmark, and secretly negotiated with Spain and tlie Emperor. 
Townshend met the last danger by a defensive treaty between 
France, England, and Prussia, which he concluded at Hanover, 
by a subsidy which detached Sweden from her ally, and by the 
dispatch of a squadron into the Baltic. But the witlidrawal of 
Prussia from the Treaty of Hanover gave fresh courage to the 
Emperor, and in 1727 Charles withdrew his embassador from En- 
gland, while Philip began the siege of Gibraltar. The Emperor, 
however, was held in check by the death of the Russian Empress 
and the firm attitude of England, France, and Holland ; and 
Spain, finding herself too weak to wage war alone, concluded in 
1729 the Treaty of Seville with the three powers. The Emperor 
still held aloof till 1731, when the five States united in the Treaty 
of Vienna, which satisfied Spain by giving the Italian Duchies to 
Don Carlos, while the maritime powers contented Charles by 
guaranteeing the Pragmatic Sanction. 

Walpole was not only the first English Peace Minister; he was^ 
the first English Minister who was a great financier, and who re- 
garded the development of national wealth and the adjustment of 
national burdens as the business of a statesman. His time of 
power was a time of great material prosperity. In 1724 the King 
could congratulate the country on its possession of " j^cace with 
all powers abroad, at home perfect tranquillity, plenty, and an un- 
interrupted enjoyment of all civil and religious rights." Popula- 
tion was growing fast. That of Manchester and Birmingham 
doubled in thirty years. The rise of manufactures was accomj^a- 
nied by a sudden increase of commerce, which was due mainly to 
the rapid development of our colonies. Liverpool, which owes its 
creation to the new trade with the West, sprang up from a little 
country town into the third port in the kingdom. With peace 
and security, the value of land, and with it the rental of every 
country gentleman, ti'ipled ; while the introduction of winter roots, 
of artificial grasses, of the system of a rotation of crops, changed 
the whole character of agriculture, and spread wealth through the 
farming classes. The wealth around him never made Walpole 
swerve from a rigid economy, from the steady reduction of the 
debt, or the diminution of fiscal duties. Even before the death 
of George the First the public burdens were reduced by twenty 
millions. But he had the sense to see that the wisest course a 
statesman can take in presence of a great increase in national in- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



vol 



diistry and national wealth is to look quietly on and let it alone. 
What he did do, howevei", was wise, and what he strove to do was 
yet wiser. As early as 1720 he declared in a speech from the 
Throne that nothing would more conduce to the extension of com- 
merce "than to make the exportation of our own manufactures, 
and the importation of the commodities used in the manufacturing 
of them, as practicable and easy as may be." The first act of his 
financial administration was to take ofl'the duties from more than 
a hundred British exports, and nearly forty articles of importation. 
In 1730 he broke in the same enlightened spirit through the preju- 
dice which restricted the commerce of the colonies to the mother 
country alone, by allowing Georgia and the Carolinas to export 
their rice directly to any part of Europe. The result was that the 
rice of America soon drove that of Italy and Egypt from the mar- 
ket. His Excise Bill, defective as it was, was the first measure in 
which an. English Minister showed' any real grasp of the principles 
of taxation. ISTo tax had from the first moment of its introduction 
been more unpopular than the Excise. Its origin was due to Pym 
and the Long Parliament, who imposed duties on beer, cider, and 
perry, which at the Restoration produced an annual income of 
more than six hundred thousand pounds. The war with France 
brought with it the malt-tax and additional duties on spirits, wine, 
tobacco, and other articles. So great had been the increase in the 
public wealth that the return from the Excise amounted at the 
death of George the First to nearly two millions and a half a year. 
But its unpopularity remained unabated, and even philosophers 
like Locke contended that the Avhole public revenue should be 
drawn from direct taxes upon the land. Walpole, on the other 
hand, saw in the growth of indirect taxation a means of freeing 
the land from all burdens whatever. Smuggling and fraud di- 
minished the revenue by immense sums. The loss on tobacco alone 
amounted to a third of the whole duty. The Excise Bill of 1733 
met this evil by the establishment of bonded warehouses, and by 
the collection of the duties from the inland dealers in the form of 
Excise and not of Customs. The first measure would have made 
London a free port, and doubled English trade. . The second would 
have so largely increased the revenue, without any loss to the con- 
sumer, as to enable Walpole to repeal the land-tax. In the case 
of tea and coffee alone, the change in the mode of levying the duty 
brought in an additional hundred thousand pounds a year. The 
necessaries of life and the raw materials of manufacture were in 
Walpole's plan to remain absolutely untaxed. Every part of Wal- 
pole's scheme has since been carried into efiect; but in 1733 he 
stood before his time. An agitation of unprecedented violence 
forced him to withdraw the bill. 

But if Walpole's aims were wise and statesmanlike, he was un- 
scrupulous in the means by which he realized them. Personally 
he was free from corruption; and he is perhaps the first great 
English statesman who left office poorer than when he entered it. 
But he was certainly the first who made Parliamentary corruption 
a regular part of his system of government. Corruption was older 



702 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



than Walpole, for it sprang ont of the very transfer of power to 
the House of Commons which had begun witli the Restoration. 
The transfer was complete, and the House was supreme in the 
State ; but while freeing itself from the control of the Crown, it 
w^as as yet only imperfectly responsible to the people. It was 
only at election time that a member felt the pressure of public 
opinion. The secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings, which had 
been needful as a safeguard against Royal interference with debate, 
served as a safeguard against interference on the part of constitu- 
encies. This strange union of immense power with absolute free- 
dom from responsibility brought about its natural results in the 
bulk of members. A vote was too valuable to be given without 
recomi^ense. Parliamentary support had to be bought by places, 
pensions, and bribes in hard cash. Walpole was probably less 
corrupt than Danby who preceded or the Pelhams who followed 
him, but he was far more cynicahin his avowal of corruption. Even 
if he were falsely credited with the saying that " every man has his 
price," he was always ready to pay the price of any man who was 
worth having. And he was driven to employ corruption lavishly 
by the very character of his rule. In the absence of a strong op- 
position and of great impulses to enthusiasm a party breaks read- 
ily into factions; and the weakness of the Tories joined with the 
stagnation of public affairs to beget faction among the Whigs. 
Walpole, too, was jealous of power; and as his jealousy drove 
colleague after colleague put of office, they became leaders of a 
party of so-called " Patriots " whose whole end Avas to drive the 
Minister from liis post. This Whig faction, which was headed by 
Pulteney and Lord Chesterfield, soon rallied to it the fragment of 
the Tory party which remained, and which was now guided by the 
virulent ability of Bolingbroke, whom Walpole had suffered to re- 
turn from exile, but to whom he had refused the restoration of his 
seat in the House of Lords. 

Through the reign of George the First these "Patriots" in- 
creased in numbers, and at the accession of his son, George the 
Second, in 1727, they counted on their enemy's fall; for the new 
King hated his father and his father's counselors, and had spoken 
of Walpole as " a rogue." But jealous of authority as he was, 
George the Second was absolutely guided by the adroitness of his 
wife, Caroline of Anspach, and Caroline had resolved that there 
should be no change in the Ministry. The ten years Avhich fol- 
lowed were in fact the years during Avhich Walpole's power was 
at its highest. The Jacobites refused to stir. The Church was 
quiet. The Dissenters pressed for a repeal of the Test and Cor- 
poration Acts, but Walpole was resolved not to arouse passions of 
religious hate which only slumbered, and satisfied them by an an- 
nual Act of Indemnity for any breach of these penal statutes. A 
few trade measures and social reforms crept quietly through the 
Houses. An inquiry into the state of the jails showed that social 
thought was not utterly dead. A bill of great value enacted that 
all proceedings in courts of justice should henceforth be in the En- 
glish language. Walpole's chief effort at financial reform, the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



703 



Excise Bill of 1733, was foiled, as we have seen, by the factious ig- 
norance of the "Patriots." The violence of his opponents was 
backed by an outburst of popular prejudice; riots almost grew 
into revolt ; and, in spite of the Queen's wish to put down resist- 
ance by force, Walpole withdrew the bill. " I will not be the 
minister," he said with noble self-command, " to enforce taxes at 
the expense of blood." He showed equal wisdom and courage in 
the difficulties which again rose abroad. In 1733 the peace of 
Europe was broken afresh by disputes which rose out of a con- 
tested election to the throne of Poland. The King was eager to 
fight, and even Caroline's German sympathies inclined her to join 
iu the fray ; but Walpole stood firm for the observance of neutrali- 
ty. " There are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe," he 
was able to say as the war went on, " and not one Englishman," 
The intervention of England and Holland succeeded in 1736 in re- 
storing peace at the cost of the cession of Naples to Don Carlos 
and of Lorraine to France. 

Walpole's defeat on the Excise Bill had done little to shake his 
power, and Bolingbroke withdrew to France in despair at the fail- 
ure of his efforts. But the Queen's death in 1737, and the violent 
support Avhich the Prince of Wales gave the "Patriots" from 
hatred to his father, were more serious blows. The country, too, 
wearied at last of its monotonous prosperity and of its monotonous 
peace. It was hard to keep from war in the Southern Seas. The 
merchant class were determined to carry on their trade with Span- 
ish America, a trade which rested indeed on no legal right, but 
had grown largely through the connivance of the Spanish officers 
during the long alliance with England from 1670 to the War of 
Succession. But the accession of a French prince to the Spanish 
throne had brought about a cessation of this connivance. Philip 
of Anjou was hostile to English trade with his American domin- 
ions ; and the efforts of Spain to preserve its own monopoly, to put 
down the vast system of smuggling which rendered it valueless, 
and to restrict English commerce to the negro slave-trade and the 
single ship stipulated by the Treaty of Utrecht, brought about 
collisions which made it hard to keep the jDeace. Walpole, who 
strove to do justice to both parties in the matter, was abused as 
" the cur-dog of England and spaniel of France." The ill-humor 
of the trading classes rose to madness in 1738, when a merchant 
captain named Jenkins told at the bar of the House of Commons 
the tale of his torture by the Spaniards, and produced an ear which 
he said they had cut off with taunts at the English king. It was 
in vain that Walpole battled stubbornly against the cry for war. 
His negotiations were foiled by the frenzy of the one country and 
the pride of the other. He stood alone in his desire for peace. 
His peace policy rested on the alliance with Holland and France; 
but the temporary hostility excited by the disputes over the suc- 
cession between Philip and the House of Orleans had passed away 
with the birth of children to Lewis the Fifteenth, and the Bourbon 
Courts were again united by family sympathies. He foresaw, there- 
fore, that a Spanish Avar would probably bring with it the rupture 

45 



V04 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of the French alliance at the very moment when the approaching 
death of the Emperor made the union of the western powers essen- 
tial to the peace of Europe. Against a war which undid all that 
he had labored for twenty years to do Walpole struggled hard. 
But the instinct of the nation was, in fact, wiser than the policy of 
the minister. Although neither England nor Walpole knew it, a 
Family Compact had been cjoncluded between France and Spain 
as long before as 1733, on the outbre^ak of the war of the Polish 
Succession, for the ruin of the maritime supremacy of England. 
Spain bound herself to deprive England gradually of her commer- 
cial privileges in America, and to transfer her trade to France. 
France in return engaged to support Spain at sea and to aid her 
in the recovery of Gibraltar. The caution with which Walpole 
held aloof from the Polish war rendered the Compact inoperative 
at the time, but neither country ceased to look forward to its 
future execution. France since the peace had strained every nerve 
to prepare a fleet ; while Spain had steadily increased the restric- 
tions on British commerce. Both were, in fact, watching for the 
opportunity of war which the Emperor's death was sure to afford, 
and in forcing on the struggle England only anticipated a danger 
which she could not escape. 

The Compact, however, though suspected, was Still unknown, 
and the perils of a contest with Spain were clear enough to justify 
Walpole in struggling hard for peace. But he struggled single- 
handed. His greed of power had mastered his strong common- 
sense ; Lord Townshend had been driven from office in 1*730, Lord 
Chesterfield dismissed in 1 733 ; and though he started with the 
ablest administration ever known, Walpole was left after twenty 
years of administration with but a single man of ability, the Chan- 
cellor, Lord Hardwicke, in his cabinet. The colleagues whom one 
by one his jealousy had dismissed, had plunged, with the exception 
of ToAvnshend, into an opposition more factious and unprincipled 
than had ever disgraced English politics; and these "Patriots" 
were now reinforced by a band of younger Whigs — the " Boys," 
as Walpole called them — whose temper revolted alike against the 
peace and corruption of his policy, and at whose head stood a 
young cornet of horse, William Pitt. Baffled as this opposition 
had been for so many years, the sudden rush of popular passion 
gave it a new strength, and in 1739 Walpole bowed to its will in 
declaring war. "They may ring their bells now," the Minister 
said bitterly, as peals and bonfires welcomed his defeat, "but they 
will soon be wringing their hands." His foresight was quickly 
justified. No sooner "had Admiral Vernon with an English fleet 
bombarded and taken Portobello than France refused to sufier En- 
gland to settle on the mainland of South America, and dispatched 
two squadrons to the West Indies. At this crisis the death of 
Charles the Sixth (Oct., 1740) forced on the European struggle 
which Walpole had dreaded. France saw in this event, and the 
disunion which it at once brought about, an opportunity of finish- 
ing the work begun by Henry the Second, and which Richelieu, 
Lewis the Fourteenth, and Cardinal Fleury had carried on — the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



705 



work of breaking up the Empire into a group of powers too weak 
to resist French ambition. In union, therefore, with Spain, which 
aimed at the annexation of the Milanese, and the King of Prussia, 
Frederick the Second, who at once occupied Silesia, France backed 
the Elector of Bavaria in his claim on the Duchy of Austria, which 
passed with the other hereditary dominions, by the Pragmatic 
Sanction, to the Queen of Hungary, Maria Theresa. Sweden and 
Sardinia allied themselves to France. England alone showed her- 
self true to her guaranty of the Austrian Succession. In the sum- 
mer of 1741 two French armies entered Germany, and the Elector 
of Bavaria appeared unopposed before Vienna. Never had the 
House of Austria stood in such utter peril. Its opponents counted 
on a division of its dominions. France claimed the Netherlands, 
Spain the Milanese, Bavaria the kingdom of Bohemia, Frederick 
the Second Silesia. Hungary and the Duchy of Austria alone were 
to be left to Maria Theresa. Even England, though still true to 
her cause, advised her to purchase Frederick's aid by the cession 
of Silesia. But the Queen refused to despair. She won the sup- 
port of Hungary by restoring its constitutional rights; and the 
subsidies of England enabled her to march at the head of a Hun- 
garian army to the rescue of Vienna, to overrun Bavaria, and repulse 
an attack of Frederick on Moravia in the spring of 1742. But on 
England's part the contest went on feebly and ineffectively. Ad- 
miral Vernon was beaten before Carthagena ; and Walpole was 
charged with thwarting and starving the wan He still repelled 
the attacks of the " Patriots " with wonderful spirit ; but in a new 
Parliament his majority dropped to sixteen, and in his own cabinet 
he became almost powerless. The buoyant temper which had car- 
ried him through so many storms broke down at last. " He who 
was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow," writes his 
son, " now never sleeps above an hour without waking ; and he 
who at dinner always forgot his own anxieties, and was more gay 
and thoughtless than all the company, now sits without speaking, 
and with his eyes fixed for an hour together." The end was in fact 
near; and the dwindling of his majority to three forced Walpole 
in the opening of 1742 to resign. 



(06 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



CHAPTER X. 

MODERN ENGLAND. 

Section I.— William Pitt. 1742— 1 762. 

\Authorities. — Lord Stanhope and Horace Walpole, as before. South ey's biog- 
raphy, or the more elaborate life by Mr.Tyerman, gives an account of Wesley and 
the movement he headed. For Pitt himself, the Chatham correspondence, his life 
by Thackeray, and Lord Macaulay's two essays on him. The Annual Register be- 
gins with 1758 — its earlier portion has been attributed to Burke. Carlyle's "Fred- 
erick the Great " gives a picturesque account of the Seven-Years' War and of En- 
gland's share in it. For Clive. see the biography by Sir John Malcolm, and Lord 
Macaulay's well-known essay.] 



The fall ofWalpole revealed a change in the temper of England 
which was to influence from that time to this its social and polit- 
ical history. New forces, new cravings, new aims, w^hich had been 
silently gathering beneath the crust of inaction, burst suddenly 
into view. The first of these embodied itself in the religious and 
philanthropic movement which bears the name of Wesley. Never 
had religion seemed at a lower ebb. The progi-ess of free inquiry, 
the aversion to theological strife which had been left by the 
Civil War, the new intellectual and material channels opened to 
human energy, had produced a general indifference to the great 
questions of religious speculation which occupied an earlier age. 
The Church, predominant as its influence seemed at the close of 
the Revolution, had sunk into political insignificance. By a sus- 
pension of the sittings of Convocation Walpole deprived the clergy 
of their chief means of agitation, while he carefully abstained from 
all measures which could arouse the prejudices of their flocks. 
The bishops, who were exclusively chosen from among the small 
number of Whig ecclesiastics, Avere rendered powerless by the 
Toryism and estrangement of their clergy, while the clergy them- 
selves stood apart from all active interference in public affairs. 
Nor was their political repose compensated by any religious activ- 
ity. A large number of prelates were mere Whig partisans, with 
no higher aim than that of promotion. The levees of the Minis- 
ters were crowded with lawn sleeves. A Welsh bishop avowed 
that he had seen his diocese but once, and habitually resided at 
the lakes of Westmoreland. The system of pluralities turned the 
wealthier and more learned of the priesthood into absentees, while 
the bulk of them were indolent, poor, and without social consider- 
ation. A shrewd, if prejudiced, observer brands the English clergy 
of the day as the most lifeless in Europe, " the most remiss of their 
labors in private, and the least severe in their lives." The decay 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



101 



of the great dissenting bodies went hand in hand with that of the 
Church, and during the early part of the century the ISTonconform- 
ists declined in number as in energy. But it would be rash to 
conclude from this outer ecclesiastical paralysis that the religious 
sentiment was dead in the people at large. There was, no doubt, 
a revolt against religion and against churches in both the extremes 
of English society. In the higher circles " every one laughs," said' 
Montesquieu on his visit to England, " if one talks of religion." 
Of the prominent statesmen of the time the greater part were un- 
believers in any form of Christianity, and distinguished for the 
grossness and immorality of their lives. Drunkenness and foul 
talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. A later prime minis- 
ter, the Duke of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing with his 
mistress at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were 
sneered out of fashion ; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his 
son, instructs him in the art of seduction as part of a polite edu- 
cation. At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the 
poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard 
to conceive, for the vast increase of population which followed on 
the growth of towns and the development of manufactures had 
been met by no efibrt for their religious or educational improve- 
ment. ISTot a new parish had been created. Hardly a single new 
church had been built. Schools there were none, save the grammar 
schools of Edward and Elizabeth. The rural peasantry, who were 
fast being reduced to pauperism by the abuse of the poor-laws, 
were left without moral or religious training of any sort. " We 
saw but one Bible in the parish of Cheddar," said Hannah More at 
a far later time, " and that was used to prop a flower-pot." Within 
the towns things were worse. There was no effective police ; and in 
great outbreaks the mob of London or Birmingham burned houses, 
flung open prisons, and sacked and pillaged at their will. The 
criminal class gathered boldness and numbers in the face of ruth- 
less laws which only testified to the terror of society — laws which 
made it a capital crime to cut down a cherry-tree, and which strung 
up twenty young thieves of a morning in front of Newgate ; while 
the introduction of gin gave a new impetus to drunkenness. In 
the streets of London gin-shops invited every passer-by to get 
drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence. 

In spite, hoAvever, of scenes such as this, England as a whole re- 
mained at heart religious. Even the apathy of the clergy was 
mingled with a new spirit of charity and good-sense, a tendency 
to subordinate ecclesiastical differences to the thought of a com- 
mon Christianity, and to substitute a rational theology for the 
Avorn-out traditions of the past. In the rniddle class the old piety 
lived on unchanged, and it was from this class that a religious re- 
vival burst forth at the close of Walpole's ministry which changed 
in a few years the whole temper of English society. The Church 
was restored to life and activity. Religion carried to the hearts 
of the poor a fresh spirit of moral zeal, while it purified our litera- 
ture and our manners. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, 
infused clemency and v\'isdom into our penal laws, abolished the 



708 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



• 
[Chap, 



slave-trade, and gave the first impulse to popular education. The 
revival began in a small knot of Oxford students, vrhose revolt 
against the religious deadness of their times sho>\'ed itself :n as- 
cetic observances, an enthusiastic devotion, and a methodical reg- 
ularity of life which gained them the nickname of "Methodists." 
Three figures detached themselves from the group as soon as, on 
its transfer to London in 1738, it attracted public attention by the 
fervor and even extravagance of its piety; and each found his 
special work in the great task to which the instinct of the new 
movement led it from the first, that of carrying religion and moral- 
ity to the vast masses of population which lay concentrated in the 
towns or around the mines 'and collieries of Cornwall and the 
north. Whitfield, a servitor of Pembroke College, was above all 
the preacher of the revival. Speech was governing English poli- 
tics ; and the religious power of speech was shown when a dread 
of "enthusiasm" closed against the new apostles the pulpits of the 
Established Church, and forced them to preach in the fields. Their 
voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous corners 
of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the 
dens of London, or in the long galleries where the Cornish miner 
hears in the pauses of his labor the sobbing of the sea. Whitfield's 
preaching was such as England had never heard before — theatrical, 
extravagant, often commonplace — but hushing all criticism by its 
intense reality, its earnestness of belief, its deep, tremulous sym- 
pathy with the sin and sorrow of mankind. It was no common 
enthusiast who could wring gold from the close-fisted Franklin 
and admiration from the fastidious Horace Walpole, or who could 
look down from the top of a green knoll at Kingswood on twenty 
thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal-pits, and see as he 
preached the tears "making white channels down tJieir blackened 
cheeks." On the rough and ignorant masses to whom they spoke 
the efiect of Whitfield and his fellow Methodists was terrible both 
for good and ill. Their preaching stirred a passionate hatred in 
their opponents. Their lives were often in danger; they were mob- 
bed, they were ducked, they were stoned, they were smothered 
with filth. But the enthusiasm they aroused was equally passion- 
ate. Women fell down in convulsions ; strong men were smitten 
suddenly to the earth ; the preacher was interrupted by bursts of 
hysteric laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenomena of 
strong spiritual excitement; — so familiar now, but at that time 
strange and unknown — followed on their sermons ; and the terrible 
sense of a conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of 
heaven, took forms at once grotesque and sublime. Charles Wes- 
ley, a Christ-Church student, came to add sweetness to this sud- 
den and startling light. He was the " sweet singer" of the move- 
ment. His hymns ^expressed the fiery conviction of its converts 
in lines so chaste and beautiful that its more extravagant features 
disappeared. The wild throes of hysteric enthusiasm passed into 
a passion for hymn-singing, and a new musical impulse was aroused 
in the people which gradually changed the face of public devotion 
throuixhout Eno-land. 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



709 



But it was liis elder brother, John Weslej^, who embodied in 
himself not this or that side of the vast movement, but the very 
movement itself. Even at Oxford, where he resided as a fellow of 
Lincoln, he had been looked upon as head of the group of Meth- 
odists, and after his return from a quixotic mission to the Indians 
of Georgia he again took the lead of the little society, which had 
removed in the interval to London. Li power as a preacher he 
stood next to Whitfield ; as a hymn-writer he stood second to his 
brother Charles. But while qombining in some degree the excel- 
lences of either, he possessed qualities in which both were utterly 
deficient: an indefatigable industry, a cool judgment, a command 
over others, a faculty of organization, a singular union of patience 
and moderation with an imperious ambition, which marked him as 
a ruler of men. He had, besides, a learning and skill in writing 
which no other of the Methodists possessed ; he was older than 
any of his colleagues at the start of the movement, and he outlived 
them all. His life, indeed, from 1703 to 1791, almost covers the 
century, and the Methodist body had passed through every phase 
of its history before he sank into the grave at the age of eighty- 
eight. It would have been impossible for Wesley to have wielded 
the power he did had he not shared the follies and extravagance 
as well as the enthusiasm of his disciples. Throughout his life 
his asceticism was that of a monk. At times he lived on bread 
only, and often slept on the bare boards. He lived in a world of 
wonders and divine interpositions. It was a miracle if the rain 
stopped and allowed him to set forward on a journey. It was a 
judgment of Heaven if a hailstorm burst over a town which had 
been deaf to his preaching. One day, he tells us, when he was 
tired and his horse fell lame, "I'thought — can not God heal either 
man or beast by any means or without any? Immediately my 
headache ceased and my horse's lameness in the same instant." 
With a still more childish fanaticism he guided his conduct, 
whether in ordinary events or in the great crises of his life, by 
drawing lots or watching the particular texts at which his Bible 
opened. But with all this extravagance and superstition, Wesley's 
mind was essentially practical, orderly, and conservative. No 
man ever stood at the head of a great revolution whose temper 
w^as so anti-revolutionary. In his earlier days the bishops had 
been forced to rebuke him for the narrowness and intolerance of 
his churchmanship. When Whitfield began his sermons in the 
fields, AVesley " could not at first reconcile himself to that strange 
w^ay." He • condemned and fought against the admission of lay- 
men as preachers till he found himself left with none but laymen to 
preach. To the last he clung passionately to the Church of En- 
gland, and looked on the body he had formed as but a lay society 
in full communion with it. He broke with the Moravians, who had 
been the earliest friends of the new movement, when they endanger- 
ed its safe conduct by their contempt of religious forms. He broke 
with Whitfield when the great preacher plunged into an extrav- 
agant Calvinism. But the same practical temper of mind which 
led him to reject what was unmeasured, and to be the last to adopt 



710 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Ghap. 



what "was new, enabled him at once to grasp and organize the nov- 
elties he adopted. He became himself the most unwearied of field 
preachers, and his journal for half a century is little more than a 
record of fresh journeys and fresh sermons. When once driven 
to employ lay helpers in his ministry, he made their Avork a new 
and attractive feature in his system. His earlier asceticism only 
lingered in a dread of social enjoyments and an aversion to the 
gayer and sunnier side of life which links the Methodist movement 
with that of the Puritans. As the fervor of his superstition died 
down into the calm of age, his cool common-sense discouraged in 
his followers the enthusiastic outbursts which marked the opening 
of the revival. His powers were bent to the building up of a 
great religious society which might give to the new enthusiasm a 
lasting and practical form. The Methodists were grouped into 
classes, gathered in love-feasts, purified by the expulsion of un- 
worthy members, and furnished with an alternation of settled min- 
isters and wandering preachers ; while the whole body was placed 
under the absolute government of a Conference of ministers. But 
so long as he lived the direction of tlie new religious society re- 
mained with Wesley alone. " If by arbitrary power," he replied 
with a charming simplicity to objectors, "you mean a power which 
I exercise simply without any colleagues therein, this is certainly 
true, but I see no hurt in it." 

Tlie great body which he thus founded — a body which number- 
ed a hundred thousand members at his death, and which now 
counts its members in England and America by millions — bears 
the stamp of Wesley in more than its name. Of all Protestant 
Churches it is the most rigid in its organization and the most des- 
potic in its government. But the Methodists themselves werfe 
the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action upon the 
Church broke the lethargy of the clergj'-, and the "Evangelical" 
movement, which found representatives like Newton and Cecil 
within the pale of the Establishment, made the fox-hunting parson 
and the absentee rector at last impossible. In Walpole's day the 
English clergy were the idlest and most lifeless in the world. In 
our own time no body of religious ministers surpasses them in 
piety, in philanthropic energy, or in popular regard. In the nation 
at large appeared a new moral enthusiasm which, rigid and pe- 
dantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social tone, and 
whose power was seen in the disappearance of the profligacy wliicli 
bad disgraced the upper classes, and the foulness which had infest- 
ed literature ever since the Restoration. But the noblest result 
of the religious revival was the steady attempt, which has never 
|a|[^ed from that day to this, to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, 
iWe physical suffering, the social degradation of the profligate and 
;.the poor. It was not till the Wesleyan movement had done its 
work that the philanthropic movement began. The Sunday-schools 
established by Mr.Raikes, of Gloucester, at the close of the century, 
were the beginnings of popular education. By writings and by 
her own personal example Hannah More drew the sympathy of 
England to the poverty and crime of the agricultural laborer. 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



711 



The passionate impulse of human sympathy with the wronged and 
afflicted raised hospitals, endowed charities, built churches, sent 
missionaries to the heathen, supported Burke in his plea for the 
Hindoo, and Clarkson and Wilberforce in their crusade against 
the iniquity of the slave-trade. It is only the moral chivalry of 
his labors that among a crowd of philanthropists draws us most, 
perhaps, to the work and character of John Howard. The sym- 
pathy which all were feeling for the sufferings of mahkiTKbire-M-t- 
for the sufferings of the worst and most hapless of men. With 
wonderful ardor and perseverance he devoted himself to the cause 
of the debtor, the felon, and the murderer. His appointment to 
the office of High Sheriff of Bedfordshire drew his attention in 
1774 to the state of the prisons which were placed in his care; 
and from that time the quiet country gentleman, whose only oc- 
cupation had been reading his Bible and studying his thermometer, 
became the most energetic and zealous of reformers. Before a 
year was over he had personally visited almost every English jail, 
and he found in nearly all of them frightful abuses which had been 
noticed half a century before, but left unredressed by Parliament. 
Jailers, who bought their places, were paid by fees, and suffered 
to extort what they could. Even when acquitted, men were drag- 
ged back to their cells for Avant of funds to discharge the sums 
they owed to their keepers. Debtors and felons were huddled to- 
gether in the prisons, which Howard found crowded by the cruel 
legislation of the day. No separation was preserved between the 
different sexes, no criminal discipline enforced. Every jail was 
a chaos of cruelty and the foulest immorality, from which the pris- 
oner could only escape by sheer starvation or by the jail-fever 
that festered without ceasing in these haunts of wretchedness. 
He saw every thing with his own eyes, he tested every suffering 
by his own experience. In one jail he found a cell so narrow and 
noisome that the poor wretch who inhabited it begged as a mercy 
for hanging. Howard shut himself up in the cell, and bore its 
darkness and foulness till nature could bear no more. But it was 
by work of this sort, and by the faithful pictures of such scenes 
which it enabled him to give, that he brought about their reform. 
The work in which he recorded his terrible experience, and the 
plans which he submitted for the reformation of criminals, make 
him the father, so far as England is concerned, of prison discipline. 
But his labors were far from being confined to England. In jour- 
ney after journey he visited the prisons of Holland and Germany, 
till his longing to discover some means of checking the fatal prog- 
ress of the Plague led him to examine the lazarettos of, Europe and 
the East. He was still engaged in this work of charity wMien he 
Avas seized by a malignant fever at Cherson in Southern Russin, 
and " laid quietly in the earth," as he desired. 

While the revival of the Wesleys Avas stirring the very heart of 
England, its political stagnation Avas unbroken. Tlie triumpli of 
Walpole's opponents ended Avith their victory. Retiring to the 
Peers as Earl of Orford, he devoted himself to breaking up the 
opposition and restoring the union of the Whigs, while he remain- 



712 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ed the confidential counselor of the King. Pnlteney accepted the 
Earldom of Bath and at once lost much of his political Aveight, 
while his more prominent followers were admitted to office. But 
Avhen on the death of their nominal leader, Lord Wilmington, 
Pnlteney claimed the post of First Minister in 1743, Walpole qui- 
etly interfered, and induced the King to raise Henry Pelham, the 
brother of the Duke of Newcastle, and one of his own most faith- 
ful adherents, to the head of the administration. The temper of 
Henry Pelham, as well as a consciousness of his own mediocrity, 
disposed him to a policy of conciliation which reunited the Whigs, 
and included every man of ability in his new Ministry. The union 
of the party was aided by the reappearance of a danger which 
seemed to have passed away. The foreign policy of Walpole 
triumi:)hed at the moment of his fall. The pressure of England, 
aided by a victory of Frederick at Chotusitz, forced Maria Theresa 
to consent to a peace with Prussia on the terms of the cession of 
Silesia ; and this peace enabled the Austrian army to drive tlie 
French from Bohemia at the close of 1742. Meanwhile one En- 
glish fleet blockaded Cadiz, another anchored in the bay of Naples, 
and forced Don Carlos by a threat of bombarding his capital to 
conclude a treaty of neutrality, while English subsidies dttached 
Sardinia from the French alliance. But at this point the loss of 
Walpole made itself felt. The foreign policy of the v/eak Ministry 
which succeeded him was chiefly directed by Lord Carteret ; and 
Carteret, who, like the bulk of the Whig party, had long been op- 
posed in heart to Walpole's system, resolved to change the Avhole 
character of the war. While Walpole limited his efibrts to the 
preservation of the House of Austria as a European power, Car- 
teret joined Maria Theresa in aiming at the ruin of the House of 
Bourbon. In the dreams of the statesmen of Vienna, the whole 
face of Europe was to be changed. Naples and Sicily were to be 
taken back frorai Spain, Elsass and Lorraine from France ; and tlie 
Luperial dignity which had passed to the Elector of Bavaria, the 
Emperor Charles the Seventh, was to be restored to the Austrian 
House. To carry out these schemes an Austrian army drove the 
Emperor from Bavaria in the spring of 1743; Avhile George the 
Second, who warmly supported the policy of Carteret, put himself 
at the head of a force of forty thousand men, the bulk of whom 
were English and Hanoverians, and marched from the Netherlands 
to the Main. His advance was checked, and finally turned into a 
retreat by the Due de Noailles, who appeared with a superior army 
on the south bank of the river, and finally throwing thirty-one 
thousand men across it threatened to compel the King to sur- 
render. In the battle of Dettingen which followed (June 27, 
1743), the allied army was in fact only saved from destruction by 
the impetuosity of the French horse and the dogged obstinacy 
with which the English held their ground, and at last forced their 
opponents to recross the Main. But small as was the victory, it 
produced amazing results. The French evacuated Germany. The 
English and Austrian armies appeared on the Rhine. In the spring 
of 1744 an Austrian army marched upon Naples, with the purpose 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



as 



of transferring it after its conquest to the Emperor, whose heredi- 
tary dominions in Bavaria were to pass in return to Maria Theresa. 
But if Frederick of Prussia had withdrawn from the war on the 
cession of Silesia, he was resolute to take up arms again rather 
than suffer this great aggrandizement of the House of Austria. 
His sudden alliance with France failed at first to change the course 
of the war, for, though he was successful in seizing Prague and 
drawing the Austrian army from the Rhine, he was soon driven 
from Bohemia, while the death of the Emperor forced Bavaria to 
lay down its arms and to ally itself with Maria Theresa. So high 
were the Queen's hopes at this moment that she formed a secret 
alliance with Russia for the division of the Prussian monarchy. 
But in 1*745 the tide turned. Marshal Saxe established the supe- 
riority of the French army in Flanders by his defeat of the Duke 
of Cumberland. Advancing with a force of English, Dutch, and 
Hanoverians to the relief of Tournay, the Duke on the 31st of May, 
1745, found the French covered by a line of fortified villages and 
redoubts, with but a single narrow gap near the hamlet of Fon- 
tenoy. Into this gap, however, the English troops, formed in a 
dense column, doggedly thrust themselves in spite of a terrible 
fire; but at the moment when the day seemed won the French 
guns, rapidly concentrated in their front, tore the column in pieces 
and drove it back in a slow and orderly retreat. The blow was 
quickly followed up in June by a victory of Frederick at Hohen- 
friedburg which drove the Austrians from Silesia, and by a landing 
of Charles Edward, the son of the Old Pretender, as James Stuart 
was called, on the coast of Scotland at the close of July. But 
defeat abroad and danger at home only quickened a political reac- 
tion which had begun long before in England. Even Carteret had 
been startled by the plan for a dismemberment of Prussia ; and as 
early as 1744 the bulk of the Whig party had learned the wisdom 
of the more temperate policy of Walpole, and had opened the way 
for an accommodation with Frederick by compelling Carteret to 
resign. The Pelhams, who represented Walpole's system, were 
now supreme, and their work was aided by the disasters of 1745. 
When England was threatened by a Catholic Pretender, it was no 
time for weakening the chief Protestant power in Germany. On 
, the refusal, therefore, of Maria Theresa to'join in a general peace, 
England concluded the Convention of Hanover with Prussia at 
the close of August, and withdrew so far as Germany was con- 
cerned from the war. 

The danger at home, indeed, had already vindicated Walpole's 
prudence in foiling the hopes of the Pretender by his steady friend- 
ship with France. It was only from France that aid could reach 
the Jacobites, and the war with France at once revived their 
hopes. Charles Edward, the grandson of James the Second, was 
placed by the French Government at the head of a formidable 
armament in 1744; but his plan of a descent on Scotland was de- 
feated by a storm which wrecked his fleet, and by the march of 
the French troops which had embarked in it to the war in Flan- 
kers. In 1745, however, the young adventurer again embaiked 



714 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



with but seven friends in a small vessel and landed on a little island 
of the Hebrides. For three weeks he stood almost alone ; but on 
the 29th of August the clans rallied to his standard in Glenfinnan, 
and Charles found himself at the head of fifteen hundred men. His 
force swelled to an army as he marched through Blair Athol on 
Perth, entered Edinburgh in triumph, and proclaimed " James the 
Eighth " at the Town Cross. Two thousand English troops who 
marched against him under Sir John Cope were broken and cut to 
pieces on the 21st of September, by a single charge of the clansmen, 
at Preston Pans, and victory at once doubled the forces of the 
conqueror. The Prince was now at the head of six thousand men, 
but all were still Highlanders, for the people of the Lowlands held 
aloof from his standard. .It Avas with the utmost difficulty that he 
could induce them, to follow him to the south. His tact and energy, 
however, at last conquered all obstacles, and, after skillf ullj'^ evad- 
ing an army gathered at Newcastle, he marched through Lanca- 
shire and pushed on the 4th of December as far as Derby. But all 
hope of success was at an end. Hardly a man rose in his support 
as he jDassed through the districts where Jacobitisra boasted of its 
strength. The people flocked to see his march as if to see a show. 
Catholics and Tories abounded in Lancashire, but only a single 
squire took up arms. Manchester was looked on as the most Jac- 
obite of English towns, but all the aid it gave was an illumination 
and two thousand jjounds. From Carlisle to Derby he had been 
joined 1oy hardly two hundred men. The policy of Walpole had 
in fact secured England for the House of Hanover. The long peace, 
the prosperity of the country, and the clemency of the govern- 
ment had done their work. Jacobitism as a fighting force was 
dead, and even Charles Edward saw that it was hopeless to con- 
quer England with five thousand Highlanders. He soon learned, 
too, that forces of double his own strength were closing on either 
side of him, Avhile a third army nnder the King and Lord Stair 
covered London. Scotland itself, now that the Highlanders were 
away, quietly renewed in all the districts of the Lowlands its alle- 
giance to the House of Hanover. Even in the Highlands the Mac- 
Leods rose in arms for King George, while the Gordons refused to 
stir, though roused by a small French force which landed at Mon- 
trose. To advance farther south was impossible, and Charles fell 
rapidly back on Glasgow; but the reinforcements which he found 
there raised his ai'my to. nine thousand men, and he marched, on 
the 23d of January, 1746," on the English army under General 
Hawley, which had followed his retreat and encamped near Fal- 
kirk. Again the wild charge of his Highlanders won victory for 
the Prince, but victory was as fatal as defeat. The bulk of his 
forces dispersed with their booty to the mountains, and Charles 
fell sullenly back to the north before the Duke of Cumberland. 
On the 16th of April the two armies faced one another on Culloden 
Moor, a few miles eastward of Inverness. The Highlanders still 
numbered six thousand men, but they were starving and dispir- 
ited. Cumberland's force Avas nearly double that of the Prince. 
Torn by the Duke's guns, the clansmen flung themselves in their 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 

1 



V15 



old fashion on the English front; /hut they were received with a 
terrible fire of musketry, and the few that broke through the first 
line found themselves fronted by a second. In a few moments all 
was over, and the Highlanders amass of hunted fugitives. Charles 
himself after strange adventures escaped to France. In England 
fifty of his followers wei'e hanged, three Scotch lords — Lovat, Bal- 
merino, and Kilmarnock — brought to the block, and forty persons 
of rank attainted by Act of Parliament. More extensive measures 
of repression were needful in the Highlands. The feudal tenures 
were abolished. The hereditary jurisdictions of the chiefs wei'e 
bought up and transferred to the Crown. The tartan, or garb of 
the clansmen, was forbidden by law. These measures, followed 
by a general Act of Indemnity, proved efiective for their purpose. 
The dread of the clansmen passed away,and the sheriif's writ soon 
ran through the Highlands with as little resistance as in the streets 
of Edinburgh. 

On the Continent the war still lingered on, though its original 
purpose had disappeared. The victories of Maria Theresa in Italy 
were balanced by those of France in the Netherlands, where Mar- 
shal Saxe inflicted on the English and Dutch the defeat of Roucoux 
and Laufleld. The danger of Holland and the financial exhaustion 
of France at last brought about in 1748 the conclusion of a j^eace 
at Aix-la-Chapelle, by which both parties restored their conquests ; 
and with this peace the active work of the Pelhara Ministry came 
to an end. Utter inaction settled down over political life, and 
turnpike bills or acts for the furtheran(je of trade engaged the 
attention of Parliament till the death of Henry Pelham in 1754. 
But abroad things were less quiet. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle 
was in fact a mere truce forced on the contending powers by sheer 
exhaustion. France was dreaming of far wider schemes for the 
humiliation of England. The troubled question of the trade with 
America had only been waived by Spain. The two powers of the 
House of Bourbon were still united by the Family Compact, and 
as early as .1752 the Queen of Hungary, by a startling change of 
policy, had secretly drawn to their alliance. Neither Maria The- 
resa nor Saxony, in fact, had ever really abandoned the design for 
the recovery of Silesia and for a partition of Prussia. The jeal- 
ousy which Russia entertained of the growth of a strong power in 
North Germany brought the Czarina Elizabeth to promise aid to 
their scheme ; and in 1755 the league of these three powers with 
France and Spain was silently completed. So secret were these 
negotiations that they had utterly escaped the notice of the Duke 
of Newcastle, the brother of Henry Pelham, and his successor in 
the direction of English affairs; but they Avere detected from the 
first by the keen eye of Fi-ederick of Prussia, who found himself 
face to face with a line of foes which stretched from Paris to St. 
Petersburg. 

The danger to England was hardly less. France appeared again 
on the stage with a vigor and audacity which recalled the days 
of Lewis the Fourteenth. The weakness and corruption of its gov- 
ernment were hidden for the time by the daring scope of its plans, 



The 
Seven- 
Years' 
War. 



'16 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



and the ability of the agents it found to carry them out. The aims 
of France spread far beyond Europe. In India, a French advent- 
urer was founding a French Empire, and planning the expulsion 
of the English merchants from their settlements along the coast. 
In America, France not only claimed the valleys of the St. Law- 
rence and the Mississippi, but forbade the English colonists to 
cross the AUeghanies, and planted Fort Duquesne on the waters 
of the Ohio. The disastrous repulse of General Braddock, who 
had marched on this fort in 1755 with a small force of regulars 
and Colonial militia, awoke even Newcastle to his danger; and 
the alliance between England and Prussia at the close of the year 
gave the signal for the Seven-Years' War. No war has had great- 
er results on the history of the world or brought greater triumphs 
to England, but few have had more disastrous beginnings. New- 
castle was too weak and ignorant to rule without aid, and yet too 
greedy of power to purchase aid by sharing it with more capable 
men. His preparations for the gigantic struggle before him may 
be guessed from the fact that there were but three regiments fit 
for service in England at the opening of 1756. France on the 
other hand was quick in her attack. Port Mahon in Minorca, the 
key of the Mediterranean, was besieged by the Duke of Richelieu 
and forced to capitulate. To complete the shame of England, a 
fleet sent to its relief under Admiral Byng retreated before the 
French. In Germany Frederick had seized Dresden at the outset 
of the war, and forced the Saxon army to surrender; and 1757 
his victory at Prague made him master of Bohemia; but a defeat 
at Kolin drove him to retreat again into Saxon}^ In the same 
year the Duke of Cumberland, who had taken jDOSt on the Weser 
with an army of fifty thousand men for the defense of Hanover, 
fell back before a French army to the mouth of the Elbe, and en- 
gaged by the Convention of Closter-Seven to disband his forces. 
A despondency without parallel in our history took possession of 
our coolest statesmen, and even the impassive Chesterfield cried 
in despair, " We are no longer a nation." 

But the nation of whicli Chesterfield despaired was really on the 
eve of its greatest triumphs, and the miserable incapacity of the 
Duke of Newcastle only called to the front the genius of Will- 
iam Pitt. Pitt, the son of a wealthy governor of Madras, had 
entered Parliament in 1734 as member for one of his father's pock- 
et. boroughs, and had at once headed the younger "Patriots" in 
their attack on Walpole. His fiery spirit had been hushed in of- 
fice during the "broad-bottom administration" which followed 
the Minister's fall, but the death of Henry Pelham again replaced 
him at the head of the Opposition. The first disaster of the war 
drove Newcastle from ofiice, and in November, 1756, Pitt became 
Secretary of State ; but in four months he was forced to resign, 
and Newcastle reappointed. In July, 1 757, however, it was neces- 
sary to recall him. The failure of Newcastle's administration 
forced the Duke to a junction with his rival; and, fortunately for 
his country, the character of the two statesmen made the compro- 
mise an easy one. For all that Pitt coveted — for the general di- 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



Ill 



rection of public affairs, the control of foreign policy, the adminis- 
tration of the war — ISTewcastle had neither capacity nor inclination. 
On the other hand, his skill in Parliamentary management was un- 
rivaled. If he knew little else, he knew better than any living 
man the price of every member and the intrigues of every bor- 
ough. What he cared for was not the control of affairs, but the 
distribution of patronage and the work of corruption, and from 
this Pitt turned disdainfully away. " Mr. Pitt does every thing," 
wrote Horace Walpole, " and the Duke gives every thing. So long 
as they agree in this partition they may do what they please." 
Out of the union of these two strangely contrasted leaders, in fact, 
rose the greatest, as it was the last, of the purely Whig adminis- 
trations. But its real power lay from beginning to end in Pitt 
himself. Poor as he was, for his income was little more than two 
hundred a year, and sj^ringing as he did from a family of no polit- 
ical importance, it was by sheer dint of genius that the young 
cornet of horse, at whose youth and inexperience Walpole had 
sneered, seized a power which the Whig houses had ever since the 
Revolution kept jealously in their grasp. His ambition had no 
petty aim. " I want to call England," he said as he took office, 
" out of that enervate state in which twenty thousand men from 
Finance can shake her." His call was soon answered. He at once 
breathed his own lofty spirit into the country he served, as he 
communicated something of his own grandeur to the men who 
served him. " No man," said a soldier of the time, "ever entered 
Mr. Pitt's closet who did not feel himself braver when he came 
out than when he went in." Ill-combined as were his earlier ex- 
peditions, many as were his failures, be aroused a temper in the 
nation at large which made ultimate defeat impossible. " England 
has been a long time in labor," exclaimed Frederick of Prussia 
as he recognized a greatness like his own, " but she has at last 
brought forth a man." 

It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most 
as we look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and ac- 
tion stands out in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In 
the midst of a society critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to 
the affectation of simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely pro- 
saic, cool of heart and of head, skeptical of virtue and enthusiasm, 
skeptical above all of itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth 
of his conviction, his passionate love for all that he deemed lofty 
and true, his fiery energ}'-^ his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical 
airs and rhetoric, his haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and 
extravagance, were not more puzzling to his contemporaries than 
the confidence with w^hich he appealed to the higher sentiments 
of mankind, the scorn with which he turned from a corruption 
which had till then been the great engine of politics, the undoubt- 
ing faith which he felt in himself, in the grandeur of his aims, and 
in his power to carry them out. " I know that I can save the 
country," he said to the Duke of Devonshire on his entry into the 
Ministry, "and I know no other man can." The groundwork of 
Pitt's character was an intense and passionate pride; but it was a 



718 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[CUA1>. 



pride wliich kept him from stooping to the level of the men who 
had so long held England in their hands. He was the first states- 
man since the Restoration who set the example of a purely pub- 
lic spirit. Keen as was his love of power, no man ever refused of- 
fice so often, or accepted it with so strict a regard to the principles 
he professed. " I will not go to Court," he replied to an oiFer 
which was made to him, " if I may not bring the Constitution with 
me." For the corruption about him he had nothing but disdain. 
He left to Newcastle the buying of seats and the purchase of mem- 
bers. At the outset of his career Pelham apj^ointed him to the 
most lucrative office in his administration, that of Paymaster of 
the Forces; but its profits were of an illicit kind, and, poor as he 
was, Pitt refused to accept one farthing beyond his salar3\ His 
pride never appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his atti- 
tude toward the people at large. No leader had ever a wider 
popularity than " the great commoner," as Pitt was styled, but 
his air was always that of a man who commands popularity, not 
that of one who seeks it. He never bent to flatter popular preju- 
dice. When mobs were roaring themselves hoarse for " Wilkes 
and liberty," he denounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate ; and 
when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haught- 
ily declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had been the 
first to enlist on the side of loyalty. His noble figure, liis flashing 
eye, his majestic voice, the fire and grandeur of his eloquence, gave 
him a sway over the House of Commons far greater than any other 
Minister has possessed. He could silence an opponent with a look 
of scorn, or hush the whole House with a single word. But he 
never stooped to the arts by which men form a political party, 
and at the height of his power his personal following hardly num-^ 
bered half a dozen members. 

His real strength, indeed, lay not in Parliament, but in the peo- 
ple at large. His significant title of "the great commoner" marks 
a political revolution. " It is the people who have sent mc here," 
Pitt boasted with a haughty pride when the nobles of the cabinet 
opposed his will. He was th^ first to see that the long political 
inactivity of the public mind had ceased, and that the progress of 
commerce and industry had produced a great middle class, which 
no longer found its representatives in the legislature. " You have 
taught me," said George the Second, when Pitt sought to save 
Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, " to look for 
the voice of my people in other places than within the House of 
Commons." It was this unrepresented class which had forced him 
into power. During his struggle with Newcastle the greater 
towns backed him with the gift of their freedom and addresses of 
confidence. " For weeks," laughs Horace Walpole, " it rained gold 
boxes." London stood by him through good report and evil re- 
port, and the Avealthiest of English merchants. Alderman Beck- 
ford, was proud to figure as his political lieutenant. The temper 
of Pitt, indeed, harmonized admirably with the temper of the com- 
mercial England which rallied around him — witli its energy, its self- 
confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its moral earnest- 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



719 



iiess. The merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural at- 
traction to the one statesman of their time whose aims were un- 
selfish, whose hands were clean, whose life was pure and full of 
tender affection for wife and child. But there was a far deeper 
ground for their enthusiastic reverence, and for the reverence which 
his country has borne Pitt ever since. He loved England with an 
intense and personal love. Pie believed in her power, her glory, 
her public virtue, till England learned to believe in herself. Her 
triumphs were his triumphs, her defeats his defeats. Her dangers 
lifted him high above all thought of self or party spirit. " Be 
one people," he cried to the factions who rose to bring about his 
fall ; " forget every thing but the public. I set you the example !" 
His glowing patriotism was the real spell by which he held En- 
gland. Even the faults which checkered his character told for 
him with the middle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded 
him had been men whose pride expressed itself in a marked sim- 
plicity and absence of pretense. Pitt was essentially an actor — 
dramatic in the cabinet, in the House, in his very office. He trans- 
acted business with his clerks in full dress. His letters to his fam- 
ily, genuine as his love for them was, are stilted and unnatural in 
tone. It was easy for the wits of his day to jest at his affectation, 
his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance which he made on great 
debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his crutch by his 
side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing into the 
House of Commons " the gestures and emotions of the stage." 
But the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily of- 
fended by faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the states- 
man who was borne into the lobby amid the tortures of the gout, 
or carried into the House of Lords to breathe his last in a protest 
against national dishonor. 

Above all, Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence. 
The power of political speech had been revealed in the stormy de- 
bates of the Long Parliament, but it was cramped in its utterance 
by the legal and theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was 
flung off by the age of the Revolution, but in the eloquence of 
Somers and his rivals we see ability rather than genius, knowledge, 
clearness of expression, precision of thought; the lucidity of the 
pleader or the man of business, rather than the passion of the ora- 
tor. Of this clearness of statement Pitt had little or none. He 
was no ready debater, like Walpole ; no speaker of set speeches, 
like Chesterfield. His set speeches were always his worst, for in 
these his want of taste, his love of effect, his trite quotations and 
extravagant metaphors came at once to the front. That with de- 
fects like these he stood far above every orator of his time was 
due above all to his profound conviction, to the earnestness and 
sincerity with which he spoke. "I must sit still," he whispered 
once to a friend, " for when once I am up every thing that is in my 
mind comes out." But the reality of his eloquence was transfig- 
ured by a glow of passion which not only raised him high above 
the men of his own day, but set him in the front rank among the 
orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the common- 

46 



720 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



sense of his age made way for a siDlendid audacity, a large and po- 
etic imagination, a sympathy with popular emotion, a sustained 
grandeur, a lofty vehemence, a command over the whole range of 
human feeling. He passed without an effort from the most solemn 
appeal to the gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm to the ten- 
derest pathos. Every word was driven home by the grand self- 
consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one havino- au- 
thoritj^ He was, in fact, the first English orator whose words 
were a power — a power not over Parliament only, but over the 
nation at large. Parliamentary reporting was as yet Unknown, 
and it was only in detached phrases and half- remembered out- 
bursts that the voice of Pitt reached beyond the walls of St. Ste- 
phen's. But it was especially in these sudden outbursts of inspi- 
ration, in these brief passionate appeals, that the power of his elo- 
quence lay. The few broken words we have of him stir the same 
thrill in our day which they stirred in the men of his own. 

But passionate as was Pitt's eloquence, it was the eloquence of 
a statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost all 
his greater struggles : his defense of the liberty of the subject 
against arbitrary imprisonment under " general warrants," of the 
liberty of the press against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of con- 
stituencies against the House of Commons, of the constitutional 
rights of America against England itself His foreign policy was 
directed to the preservation of Prussia, and Prussia has at last 
vindicated his foresight by the creation of Germany. We have 
adopted his plans for the direct government of India by the Crown 
— plans which, when he proposed them, were regarded as insane. 
Pitt was the first to recognize the liberal character of the Church 
of England, its " Calvinistic Articles and Arminian Liturgy;" he 
was the first to sound the note of Parliamentary reform. One of 
his earliest measures shows the generosity and originality of his 
mind. He quieted Scotland by employing its Jacobites in the 
service of their country and by raising Highland regiments among 
its clans. The selection of Wolfe and Amherst as generals show- 
ed his contempt for precedent and his inborn knowledge of men. 
There was little, indeed, in the military expeditions with which 
Pitt's Ministry opened to justify his fame. Money and blood were 
lavished on buccaneering descents upon the French coasts which 
did small damage to the enemy. But in Europe Pitt wisely limit- 
ed himself to a secondary part. He recognized the genius of Fred- 
erick the Great, and resolved to give him a firm and energetic 
support. The Convention of Closter-Seven had almost reduced 
Frederick to despair. But the moment of Pitt's accession to power 
was marked on the King's part by the most brilliant display of 
military genius which the modern world had as yet seen. Two 
months after his repulse at Kolin he flung himself on a French 
army which advanced into the heart of Germany, and annihilated 
it in the victory of Rossbach. Before another month had passed 
he hurried from the Saale to the Oder, and by a yet more signal 
victory at Leuthen cleared Silesia of the Austrians. But these 
prodigious efibrts would have been useless but for the aid of Pitt. 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



T21 



The English Minister poui-ed subsidy upon subsidy into Frederick's 
exhausted treasury, while he refused to ratify the Convention of 
Closter-Seven, and followed the King's advice by setting the Prince 
of Brunswick at the head of the army on the Elbe, 

The victory of Rossbach was destined to change the fortunes of 
the world by bringing about the unity of Germany ; but the year 
of Rossbach was the year of a victory hardly less important in the 
East. The genius and audacity of a merchant-clerk made a com- 
pany of English traders the sovereigns of Bengal, and opened that 
wondrous career of conquest which has added the Indian peninsu- 
la, from Ceylon to the Himalayas, to the dominions of the British 
crown. The early intercourse of England with India gave little 
promise of the great fortunes which awaited it. It was not till 
the close of Elizabeth's reign, a century after Vasco da Gama had 
crept around the Cape of Good Hope and founded the Portuguese 
settlements on the Goa coast, that an East India Company was 
founded in London. The trade, profitable as it was, remained 
small in extent, and the three early factories of the Company were 
only gradually acquired during the century which followed. The 
first, that of Madras, consisted of but six fishermen's houses be- 
neath Fort St. George; that of Bombay was ceded by the Portu- 
guese as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza ; while Fort 
William, with the mean village which has since grown into Cal- 
cutta, owes its origin to the reign of William the Third. Each of 
these forts was built simply for the protection of the Company's 
warehouses, and guarded by a few " sepahis," sepoys, or paid na- 
tive soldiers ; while the clerks and traders of each establishment 
were under the direction of a President and a Council. One of 
these clerks in the middle of the eighteenth century was Robert 
Clive, the son of a small proprietor near Market Drayton, in Shrop- 
shire, an idle dare-devil of a boy whom his friends had been glad 
to get rid of by packing him off in the Company's service as a 
writer to Madras. His eai'ly days there were days of wretched- 
ness and desjDair. He was poor, and cut off from his fellows by 
the haughty shyness of his temper, weary of desk-work and haunt- 
ed by homesickness. Twice he attempted suicide ; and it was 
only on the failure of his second attempt that he flung down the 
pistol which bafiied him^with a conviction that he was reserved 
for higher things. 

A change came at last in the shape of war and captivity. As 
soon as the war of the Austrian Succession broke out the superior- 
ity of the French in power and influence tempted them to expel 
• the English from India. Labourdonnais, the governor of the 
French colony of the Mauritius, besieged Madras, razed it to the 
ground, and carried its clerks and merchants prisoners to Pondi- 
cherry, Clive was among these captives, but he escaped in dis- 
guise, and, returning to the settlement, threw aside his clerkship 
for an ensign's commission in the force which the Company was 
busily raising; for the capture of Madras had not only establish- 
ed the repute of the French arms, but had roused Dupleix, the 
governor of Pondicherry, to conceive plans for the creation of a 



722 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



French emijire in India, When the English merchants of Eliza- 
beth's day brought their goods to Surat, all India, save the south, 
had just been brought for the first time under the rule of a single 
great power by the Mogul emperors of the line of Akbar. But 
with the death of Aurungzebe, in the reign of Anne, the Mogul Em- 
pire fell fast into decay. A line of feudal princes raised them- 
selves to independence in Rajpootana. The lieutenants of the Em- 
peror founded separate sovereignties at Lucknow and Hyderabad, 
in the Carnatic and in Bengal. The plain of the Upper Indus was 
occupied by a race of religious fanatics called the Sikhs. Persian 
and Aflfghan invaders crossed the Indus, and succeeded even in 
sacking Delhi, the capital of the Moguls. Clans of systematic 
plunderers, who were known under the name of Mahrattas, and 
who were in fact the natives whom conquest had long held in sub- 
jection, poured down from the highlands along the western coast, 
ravaged as far as Calcutta and Tanjore, and finally set up inde- 
pendent states at Poonah and Gwalior. Dupleix skillfully availed 
himself of the disorder around him. He offered his aid to the 
Emperor against the rebels and invaders who had reduced his 
power to a shadow ; and it was in the Emperor's name that he 
meddled with the quarrels of the states of Central and Southern 
India, made himself virtually master of the Court of Hyderabad, 
and seated a creature of his own on the throne of the Carnatic. 
Trichinopoly, the one town which held out against this Nabob of 
the Carnatic, was all but brought to surrender when Clive, in iVol, 
came forward with a daring scheme for its relief With a few 
hundred English and sepoys he pushed through a thunder-storm 
to the surprise of Arcot, the Nabob's capital, intrenched himself 
in its enormous fort, and held it for fifty days against thousands 
of assailants. Moved by his gallantly, the Mahrattas, who had 
never believed that Englishmen would fight before, advanced and 
broke up the siege ; but Clive was no sooner freed than he showed 
equal vigor in the field. At the head of raw recruits who ran 
away at the first sound of a gun, and sepoys who hid themselves 
as soon as the cannon opened fire, he twice attacked and defeated 
the French and their Indian allies, foiled every efibrt of Dupleix, 
and razed to the ground a pompous pillar which the French gov- 
ernor had set up in honor of his eai'lier victories. 

Recalled by broken health to England, Clive returned at the 
outbreak of the Seven- Years' War to win for England a greater 
prize than that which his victories had won for it in the suprem- 
acy of the Carnatic. He had only been a fe^ months at Madras 
when a crime whose horror still lingers in English memories call- 
ed him to Bengal. Bengal, the delta of the Ganges, was the rich- 
est and most fertile of all the provinces of India. Its rice, its 
sugar, its silk, and the produce of its looms, were fiimous in Euro- 
pean markets. Its Viceroys, like their fellow-lieutenants, had be- 
come practically independent of the Emperor, and had added to 
Bengal the provinces of Orissa and Behar. Surajah Dowlah, the 
master of this vast domain, had long been jealous of the enterprise 
and wealth of the English traders ; and, roused at this moment by 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



723 



the instigation of the French, he appeared "before Fort William, 
seized its settlers, and thrust a hundred and fifty of them into a 
small prison called the Black Hole of Calciitta. The heat of an 
Indian summer did its work of death. The wretched prisoners 
trampled each other under foot in the madness of thirst, and in 
the morning only twenty-three remained alive. Clive sailed at 
the news with a thousand Englishmen and two thousand sepoys 
to wreak vengeance for the crime. He was no longer the boy- 
soldier of Arcot ; and the tact and skill with which he met Sura- 
jah Dowlah in the negotiations by which the Viceroy strove to 
avert a conflict were sullied by the Oriental falsehood and treach- 
ery to which he stooped. But his courage remained unbroken. 
When the two armies faced each other on the plain of Plassey, the 
odds were so great that on the very eve of the battle a council of 
war counseled retreat. Clive withdrew to a grove hard by, and 
after an hour's lonely musing gave the word to fight. Courage, 
in fact, was all that was needed. The fifty thousand foot and 
fourteen thousand horse who were seen covering the plain at day- 
break on the 23d of June, 1757, were soon thrown into confusion 
by the English guns, and broke in headlong rout before the En- 
glish charge. The death of Surajah Dowlah enabled the Compa- 
ny to place a creature of its own on the throne of Bengal, but his 
rule soon became a nominal one. With the victory of Plassey be- 
gan in fact the Empire of England in the East. 

In Germany, the news of Rossbach called the French from the 
Elbe back to the Rhine in the opening of 1758. Ferdinand of 
Brunswick, reinforced with twenty thousand English soldiers, held 
them at bay dui-ing the summer, while Frederick, foiled in an at- 
tack on Moravia, drove the Russians back on Poland in the battle 
of Zorndorf. His defeat, however, by the Austrian General Daun 
at Hochkirch proved the first of a series of terrible misfortunes. 
The year 1759 marks the lowest point of Frederick's fortunes. A 
fresh advance of the Russian army forced the King to attack it at 
Kunersdorf in August^ and his repulse ended in the utter rout of 
his army. For the moment all seemed lost, for even Berlin lay 
open to the conqueror. A few days later the surrender of Dresden 
gave Saxony to the Austrians ; and at the close of the year an at- 
tempt upon them at Plauen was foiled with terrible loss. But 
every disaster was retrieved by the indomitable courage and te- 
nacity of the King, and winter found him as before master of 
Silesia and of all Saxony save the ground which Daun's camp 
covered. The year which marked the lowest point of Frederick's 
fortunes was the year of Pitt's greatest triumphs — the year of Min- 
den and Quiberon and Quebec. France aimed both at a descent 
upon- England and the conquest of Hanover, and gathered a naval 
armament at Brest, while fifty thousand men under Contades and 
Broglie united on the Weser. Ferdinand with less than forty 
thousand met them (August 1) on the field of Minden. The 
French marched along the Weser to the attack, with their flanks 
protected by that river and a brook which ran into it, and with 
their cavalr}'-, ten thousand strong, massed in the centre. The six 



124. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.. 



[Chat. 



English regiments in Ferdinand's army fronted the French horse, 
and, mistaking their general's order, marched at once upon them 
in line, regardless of the batteries on their flank, and rolling back 
charge after charge with volleys of musketry. In an hour the 
French centre was utterly broken. "I have seen," sai^'Contades, 
" what I never thought to be jDossible — a single line of infantry 
break through three lines of cavalry, ranked in order of battle, 
and tumble them to ruin !" Nothing but the refusal of Lord 
George Sackville to complete the victory by a charge of Ferdi- 
nand's horse saved the French from utter rout. As it was, their 
army again fell back broken on Frankfort and the Rhine. The 
project of an invasion of England met with the same success. 
Eighteen thousand men lay ready to embark on board the French 
fleet, when Admiral Hawke came in sight of it on the 20th of No- 
vember, at the mouth of Quiberon Bay. The sea was rolling high, 
and the coast where the French ships lay was so dangerous from 
its shoals and granite reefs that the jDilot remonstrated with the 
English admiral against his project of attack. " You have done 
your duty in this remonstrance," Hawke coolly replied ; " now lay 
me alongside the French admiral." Two English ships were lost 
on the shoals, but the French fleet was ruined and the disgrace of 
Byng's retreat wiped away. 

It was not in the Old World only that the year of Minden and 
Quiberon brought glory to the arms of England. In Europe, Pitt 
had wisely limited his eflbrts to the support of Prussia, but across 
the Atlantic the field was wholly his own. The French dominion 
in North America, which was originally confined to Cape Breton 
and Canada, had been pushed by the activity of the Marquis of 
Montcalm along the great chain of lakes toward the Ohio and the 
Mississippi. Three strong forts — that of Duquesne on the Ohio, 
that of Niagara on the St. Lawrence, and that of Ticonderoga on 
Lake Champlain — supported by a chain of less important posts, 
threatened to cut oif the English colonies of the coast from any 
possibility of extension over the prairies of the West. Montcalm 
was gifted with singular powers of administration; he had suc- 
ceeded in attaching the bulk of the Indian tribes from Canada as 
far as the Mississippi to the cause of his nation, and the value of 
their aid had been shown in the rout of the British detachment 
which General Braddock led against Fort Duquesne. But Pitt 
had no sooner turned his attention to American afiairs than these 
desultory raids were superseded by a large and comprehensive 
plan of attack. A combined expedition under Amherst and Bos- 
cawen captured Louisburg in 1758, and reduced the colony of Cape 
Breton at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. The American militia 
supported the British troops in a vigorous campaign against the 
forts, and though Montcalm was able to repulse General Aber- 
cromby from Ticonderoga, a force from Philadelphia made itself 
master of Duquesne. The name of Pittsburg which was given to 
their new conquest still commemorates the* enthusiasm of the col- 
onists for the great Minister who first opened to them the West. 
The next year (1759) saw the evacuation of Ticonderoga before 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



725 



the advance of Amherst, and the capture of Fort Niagara after 
the defeat of an Indian force which marched to its relief. But 
Pitt had resolved not merely to foil the ambition of Montcalm, but 
to destroy the French rule in America altogether ; and while Am- 
herst was breaking through the line of forts, an expedition under 
General Wolfe entered the St. Lawrence and anchored below Que- 
bec. Pitt had discerned the genius and heroism which lay hidden 
beneath the awkward manner and the occasional gasconade of the 
young soldier of thirty-three whom he chose for the crowning ex- 
ploit of the war, but for a while his sagacity seemed to have failed. 
No efforts could draw Montcalm from the long line of inaccessible 
cliffs which at this point borders the riyer, and for six weeks Wolfe 
saw his men wasting away in inactivity, while he himself lay pros- 
trate with sickness and despair. At last his resolution was fixed, 
and in a long line of boats the army dropped down the St. Law- 
rence to a point at the base of the Heights of Abraham, where a 
narrow path had been discovered to the summit. Not a voice 
broke the silence of the night save the voice of Wolfe himself, as 
he quietly repeated the stanzas of Gray's "Elegy in a Country 
Church-yard," remarking as he closed, " I had rather be the author 
of that poem than take Quebec." But his nature was as brave as 
it was tender ; he was the first to leap on shore and to scale the 
narrow path, where no two men could go abreast. His men fol- 
lowed, pulling themselves to the top by the help of bushes and the 
crags, and at daybreak on the 12th of September the whole army 
stood in orderly formation before Quebec. Wolfe headed a charge 
which broke the lines of Montcalm, but a ball pierced his breast 
in the moment of victory. " They run," cried an officer who held 
the dying man in his arms — " I protest they run." Wolfe rallied 
to ask who they were that i-an, and he was told "the French." 
"Then," he murmured, "I die happy." The fall of Montcalm in 
the moment of his defeat completed the victory, and the submis- 
sion of Canada put an end to the dream of a French empire in 
America. In breaking through the line with which France had 
striven to check the westward advance of the English colonists 
Pitt had unconsciously changed the history of the world. His 
support of Frederick and of Prussia was to lead in our own day 
to the creation of a United Germany. His conquest of Canada, by 
removing the enemy whose dread knit the colonists to the mother 
country, and by flinging open to their energies in the days to come 
the boundless plains of the West, laid the foundation of the United 
States. 



Section II.— The Independence of America. 1761— lYSS. 

[^Authorities. — The two sides of the American quarrel have been told with the 
same purpose of fairness and truthfidness, though with a very different bias, by 
Lord Stanhope ("History of England from Peace of Utrecht") and Mr. Bancroft 
("History of the United States "). The latter is by far the more detailed and pict- 
uresque, the former perhaps the cooler and more impartial of the two narratives. 
To the authorities for England itself given in the last section we may add here Mr. 
Blassey's valuable " History of England from the Accession of George the Third ;" 



726 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Walpole's "Memoirs of the Early Keign of George the Third;" the Kockingham 
Memoirs ; the Grenville Papers ; the Bedford Correspondence ; the correspondence 
of George the Third with Lord North ; the Letters of Junius ; and Lord EusselFs 
"Life and Correspondence of C. J. Fox." Burke's speeches and pamphlets during 
this period, ahove all his " Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents," 
are indispensable for any real knowledge of it. The Constitutional History of Sir 
Erskine May opens with this time, and all but compensates us, in its fullness and 
impartiality and acuteness, for the loss of Mr. Hallam's invaluable comments.] 



England had never played so great a part in the history of man- 
kind as now. The year I'ZoQ was a year of triumphs in every 
quarter of the world. In September came the news of Minden 
and of a victory off Lagos. In October came tidings of the capt- 
ure of Quebec. November brought word of the French defeat at 
Quiberon. " We are forced to ask every morning what victory 
there is," laughed Horace Walpole, "for fear of missing one." 
But it was not so much in the number as in the importance of its 
triumphs that the war stood and remains still without a rival. It 
is no exaggeration to say that three of its many victories deter- 
mined for ages to come the destinies of the world. With that of 
Rossbach began the recreation of Germany, its intellectual su,pre'm- 
acy over Europe, its political union under the leadership of Prussia 
and i^s kings. With that of Plassey the influence of Eurojoe told 
for the first time since the days of Alexander on the nations of the 
East, The world, in Burke's gorgeous phrase, saw " one of the 
races of the northeast cast into the heart of Asia new manners, 
new doctrines, new institutions." With the triumph of Wolfe on 
the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States 
of America, 

The progress of the American colonies from the time Avhen the 
Puritan emigration added the four New England States — Massa- 
chusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — to those, 
of Maryland and Virginia had been slow, but it had never ceased. 
Settlers still came, though in smaller numbers, and two new colo- 
nies south of Virginia received from Charles the Second their name 
of the Carolinas, The war with Holland transferred tp British 
rule the district claimed by the Dutch from the Hudson to the in- 
ner Lakes, and the country was at once granted by Charles to his 
brother, and received from him the name of New York, Portions 
were soon broken off from this vast territory to form the colonies 
of New Jersey and Delaware. In 1682 a train of Quakers followed 
William Penn across the Delaware into the heart of the primeval 
forest, and became a colony which recalled its founder and the 
woodlands in which he planted it in its name of Pennsylvania, A 
long interval elapsed before a new settlement, which received its 
title of Georgia from the reigning sovereign, George the Second, 
was established by General Oglethorpe on the Savannah as a 
refuge for English debtors and for the persecuted Protestants of 
Germany, Slow as this progress seemed, the colonies were really 
growing fast in numbers and in wealth. Their population at the 
accession of Geors^e the Third was little less than a million and a 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



121 



half, a fourth of the population of the mother country. Their 
wealth had risen even faster than their numbers. Half a million 
of slaves were employed in tilling the rice-fields of Georgia, the 
indigo-fields of the Carolinas, and the tobacco plantations of Vir- 
ginia. iTew York and Pennsylvania grew rich from corn-harvests 
and the timber trade. But the distinction between the Northern 
and Southern colonies was more than an industrial one. In the 
Southern States the prevalence of slavery produced an aristocratic 
spirit and favored the creation of large estates. Even the system 
of entails had been introduced among the wealthy planters of Vir- 
ginia, where many of the older English families found representa- 
tives in houses such as those of Fairfax and Washington. Through- 
out New England, on the other hand, the characteristics of the 
Puritans — their piety, their intolerance, their simplicity of life, their 
love of equality and tendency to democratic institutions — remain- 
ed unchanged. In education and political activity New England 
stood far ahead of its fellow colonies, for the settlement of the 
Puritans had been followed at once by the establishment of a sys- 
tem of local schools which is still the glory of America. "Every 
township," it was enacted, " after the Lord hath increased them to 
" the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to teach all 
children to write and read ; and when any town shall increase to 
the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a grammar 
school," 

Great, however, as these difierences were, .and great as was to 
be their influence on American history, they were little felt as yet. 
In the main features of their outer organization the whole of the 
colonies stood fairly at one. In religious and in civil matters alike 
all of them contrasted sharply with the England at home. Relig- 
ious tolerance had been brought about by a medley of religious 
faiths such as the world had never seen before. New England was 
still a Puritan stronghold. In Virginia the bulk of the settlers 
clung to the Episcopalian Church. Roman Catholics formed a 
large part of the population of Maryland. Pennsylvania was a 
State of Quakers. Presbyterians and Baptists had fled from tests 
and persecutions to colonize New Jersey. Lutherans and Mora- 
vians from Germany abounded among the settlers of Carolina and 
Georgia. In such a chaos of creeds religious persecution or an 
Established Church were equally impossible. There was the same 
real unity in the political tendency and organization of the States 
as in the religious. Whether the temper of the colony was demo- 
cratic, moderate, or oligarchical, its form of government was pret- 
ty much the same. The original rights of the jDroprietor, .the i^ro- 
jector and grantee of the earliest settlement, had in every case 
either ceased to exist or fallen into desuetude. The government 
of each colony lay in a House of Assembly elected by the people 
at large, with a Council sometimes elected, sometimes nominated 
by the Governor, and a Governor appointed by the Crown. AVith 
the appointment of the Governor all administrative interference 
on the part of the government at home practically ended. The 
colonies were left by a happy neglect to themselves. It was wit- 



728 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



tily said at a later day that " Mr. Grenville lost America because 
he read the American dispatches, which none of his predecessors 
ever did." There was little room, indeed, for any interference 
within the limits of the colonies. Their privileges were secured 
by Royal charters. Their Assemblies had the sole i-ight of internal 
taxation, and exercised it sparingly. Walpole, like Pitt afterward, 
set roughly aside the project for an American excise. " I have 
Old England set against me," he said, " by this measure, and do 
you think I will have New England too ?" Even in matters of 
trade the supremacy of the mother country was far from being a 
galling one. There were some small import duties, but they were 
evaded by a well-understood system of smuggling. The restric- 
tion of trade with the colonies to Great Britain was more than 
compensated by the commercial privileges which the Americans 
enjoyed as British subjects. As yet, therefore, there was nothing 
to break the good-will which the colonists felt toward the mother 
country, while the danger of French aggression dreAv them close- 
ly to it. Populous as they had become, the English settlements 
still lay mainly along the sea-board of the Atlantic, Only a few 
exploring parties had penetrated into the Alleghanies before the 
Seven-Years' War ; and Indian tribes wandered unquestioned along 
the lakes. It was by his success in winning over these tribes to 
an acknowledgment of the supremacy of France that Montcalm 
was drawn to the project of extending the French dominion over 
the broad plains of the Ohio and the Missouri from Canada to the 
Mississippi, and of cutting off the English colonies from all access 
to the West. The instinct of the settlers taught them that in such 
a project lay the death-blow of America's future greatness ; the 
militia of the colonies marched with Braddock to his fatal defeat,' 
and shared with the troops of Amherst the capture of Duquesne. 
The name of " Pittsburg," which they gave to their prize, still re- 
calls the gratitude of the colonists to the statesman whose genius 
had rolled away the danger which threatened their destinies. 

But strong as the attachment of the colonists to the mother 
country seemed at this moment, there were keen politicians who 
saw in the very completeness of Pitt's triumph a danger to their 
future union. The presence of the French in Canada had thrown 
the colonies on the protection of Great Britain. With the con- 
quest of Canada their need of this protection was removed. _ For 
the moment, however, all thought of distant result was lost in the 
nearer fortunes of the war. In Germany the steady support of 
Pitt alone enabled Frederick to hold out against the terrible ex- 
haustion of his nriequal struggle. His campaign of 1760, indeed, 
was one of the grandest efforts of his genius. Foiled in an attempt 
on Dresden, he again saved Silesia by his victory of Liegnitz, and 
hurled back an advance of Daun by a victory at Torgau ; while 
Ferdinand of Brunswick held his ground as of old along tlie We- 
ser. But even victories drained Frederick's strength. Men and 
money alike failed him. It was impossible for him to strike anoth- 
er great blow, and the ring of enemies again closed slowly around 
him. His one remaining hope lay in the firm support of Pitt ; and, 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



729 



triumphant as his policy had been, Pitt was tottering to his fall. 
The envy and resentment of his colleagues at his undisguised su- 
j^remacy found an unexpected supporter in the young sovereign 
who mounted the throne on the death of his grandfather in 1760. 
For the first and last time since the accession of the House of 
Hanover England saw a king who was resolved to play a part in 
English politics ; and the part which George the Third succeeded 
in playing was undoubtedly a memorable one. In ten years he 
reduced government to a shadow, and turned the loyalty of his 
subjects into disafiection. In twenty he had forced the colonies 
of America into revolt and independence, and brought England to 
the brink of ruin. Work such as this has sometimes been done by 
very great men, and often by very wicked and profligate men ; but 
George was neither profligate nor great. He had a smaller mind 
than any English king before him save James the Second. He 
was wretchedly educated, and his natural taste was of the mean- 
est sort. "Was there ever such stuiF as Shakspere?" he asked. 
Nor had he the capacity for using greater minds than his own by 
which some sovereigns have concealed their natural littleness. On 
the contrary, his only feeling toward great men was one of jeal- 
ousy and hate. He longed for the time when " decrepitude or 
death " might put an end to Pitt, and even when death had freed 
him from " this trumpet of sedition," he denounced the proposal 
for a public monument as " an ofiensive measure to me personal- 
ly." But dull and petty as his temper M-as, he was clear as to his 
purpose and obstinate in his pursuit of it. And his purpose was 
to rule. " George," his mother, the Princess of Wales, had con- 
tinually repeated to him in youth — " George, be king." He called 
himself always " a Whig of the Revolution," and he had no wish 
to undo the work which he believed the Revolution to have done. 
His wish was not to govern against law, but simply to govern ; to 
be freed from the dictation of parties and ministers, to be in ef- 
fect the first minister in the State. How utterly incompatible such 
a dream was with the Parliamentary constitution of the country 
as it had received its final form from Sunderland we have already 
seen; but George av as resolved to carry out his dream. And in 
carrying it out he was aided by the circumstances of the time. 
The defeat of Charles Edward and the later degradation of his life 
had worn away the thin coating of Jacobitism which clung to the 
Tories. They were ready again to take part in politics ; and in 
the accession of a king who, unlike his two predecessors, was no 
stranger, but an Englishman, Avho had been born in England and 
spoke English, they found the opportunity they desired. Their 
withdrawal from public affairs had left them untouched by the 
progress of political ideas since the Revolution of 1G88, and they 
returned to invest the new sovereign with all the reverence which 
they had bestowed on the Stuarts. A " King's party " was thus 
ready-made to his hand ; but George was able to strengthen it by 
a vigorous exertion of the power and influence which was still left 
to the Crown. All promotion in the Church, all advancement in 
the array, a great number of places in the civil administration and 



730 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



about the court, were still at the Kmg's disposal. If this vast mass 
of patronage had been practically usurped by the ministers of his 
predecessors, it was resumed and iirmly held by George the Third ; 
and the character of the House of Commons made patronage, as we 
have seen, a powerful engine in its management. George had one 
of Walpole's weapons in his hands, and he used it with unscrupu- 
lous energy to break up the party which Walpole had held so long 
together. He saw that the Whigs were divided among themselves 
by the factious spirit which springs from a long hold of power, and 
that they were weakened by the rising contempt with which the 
country at large regarded the selfishness and corruption of its rep- 
resentatives. More than thirty years before, Gay had quizzed the 
leading statesmen of the day on the public stage under the guise 
of highwaymen and pickpockets. " It is difficult to^ determine," 
said the witty playwright, " whether the fine gentlemen imitate 
the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine 
gentlemen." And now that the " fine gentlemen " were represent- 
ed by hoary jobbers such as Newcastle, the public contempt was 
fiercer than ever, and men turned sickened from the intrigues and 
corruption of party to the young sovereign Avho aired himself in 
the character which Bolingbroke had invented of a Patriot King. 
Had Pitt and Newcastle held together, supported as the one 
was by the commercial classes and public opinion, the other by the 
Whig families and the whole machinery of Parliamentary manage- 
ment, George must have struggled in vain. But the ministry was 
already disunited. The Whigs, a,ttached to peace by the traditions 
of Walpole, dismayed at the enormous expenditure, and haughty 
with the pride of a ruling oligarchy, were in silent revolt against 
the war and the supremacy of the Great Commoner. It was against" 
their will that Pitt rejected proposals of peace from France on the 
terms of a desertion of Prussia. In 1761 he urged a new war with 
Spain. He had learned the secret signature of a fresh family com- 
pact between the two Bourbon Courts of Spain and France, and 
he proposed to anticipate the blow by a seizure of the treasure 
fleet from the Indies, by occupying the Isthmus of Panama, and at- 
tacking the Spanish dominions in the New World. His colleagues 
shrank from jilans so vast and daring ; and Newcastle was spurred 
to revolt by the King, and backed in it by the rest of the Whigs. 
It was in vain that Pitt enforced his threat of resignation bj'- de- 
claring himself responsible to " the people," or that the Londoners 
after his dismissal from office hung on his carriage- wheels, hugged 
his footman, and even kissed his horses. The fall of the great 
statesman in October changed the whole look of European affairs. 
"Pitt disgraced," wrote a French philosopher — "it is worth two 
victories to us !" Frederick, on the other hand, was almost driven 
to despair. George saw in the great statesman's fall nothing but 
an opening for peace. He quickly availed himself of the weakness 
and unpopularity in which the ministry found itself involved after 
Pitt's departure to drive the Duke of Newcastle from office by a 
series of studied mortifications, and to place the Marquis of Bute 
at its head. Bute was a mere court favorite, with the abilities of 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



731 



a gentleman usher; but he was willing to do the King's will, and the 
King's will was to end the war. Frederick, who still held his 
ground stubbornly against fate, was brought to the brink of ruin 
in the spring of 1762 by the withdrawal of the English subsidies. 
It was, in fact, only his wonderful resolution, and the sudden change 
in the policy of Russia which followed on the death of his enemy 
the Czarina Elizabeth, which enabled him to retire from the strug- 
gle in the Treaty of Hubertsburg without the loss of an inch of ter- 
ritory. George and Lord Bute had already purchased peace at a 
very different price. With a shameless indifference to the national 
honor, they had even offered Silesia to Austria and East Prussia 
to the Czarina in return for a cessation of hostilities. Fortunate- 
ly the issue of the strife with Spain saved England from such hu- 
miliation as this. Pitt's policy had been vindicated by a Spanish 
declaration of war three weeks after his fall ; and the surrender of 
Cuba and the Philippines to a British fleet brought about the Peace 
of Paris in September, 1763. England restored Martinique, the 
most important of her West Indian conquests, to France, and Cuba 
and the Philippines to Spain in return for the cession of Florida. 
Her real gains were in India and America. In the first the French 
abandoned all right to any military settlement ; in the second they 
gave up Canada and Nova Scotia. 

The anxiety which the young King showed for peace abroad 
sprang simply from his desire to begin the struggle for power at 
home. So long as the war lasted, Pitt's return to ofiice and the 
union of the Whigs under his guidance was an hourly danger. 
But with peace the King's hands were free. He could count on 
the dissensions of the Whigs, on the new-born loyalty of the To- 
ries, on the influence of the Crown j)atronage which he had taken 
into his own hands ; but what he counted on most of all was the 
character of the House of Commons. At a time when it had be- 
come all-powerful in the State, when government hung simply on 
its will, the House of Commons had ceased in any real and effect- 
ive sense to represent the Commons at all. The changes in the 
distribution of seats which were called for by the natural shiftings 
of population and wealth since the days of Edward the First had 
been recognized as early as the Civil Wars; but the reforms of 
the Long Parliament were canceled at the Restoration. From 
the time of Charles the Second to that of George the Third not a 
single effort had been made to meet the growing abuses of our 
Parliamentary system. Great towns like Manchester or Birming- 
ham remained without a member, while members still sat for bor- 
oughs which, like Old Sarum, had actually vanished from the face 
of the earth. The effort of the Tudor sovereigns to establish a 
Court party in the House by a profuse creation of boroughs, most 
of which were mere villages then in the hands of the Crown, had 
ended in the appropriation of these seats by the neighboring land- 
owners, who bought and sold them as they sold their own estates. 
Even in towns which had a real claim to representation, the nar- 
rowing of municipal privileges ever since the fourteenth century 
to a small part of the inhabitants, and in many cases the restric- 



732 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



tion of electoral rights to the members of the governing corpora- 
tion, rendered their representation a mere name. The choice of 
such places hung simply on the purse or influence of politicians. 
Some Avere " the King's boroughs," others obediently returned 
nominees of the Ministry of the day, others were " close boroughs" 
in the hands of jobbers like the Duke of Newcastle, who at one 
time returned a third of all the borough members in the House. 
The counties and the great commercial towns could alone be said 
to exercise any real right of suffi'age, though the enormous ex- 
pense of contesting such constituencies practically left their rep- 
resentation in the hands of the great local families. But even in 
the counties the suffrage was ridiculously limited and unequal. 
Out of a population, in fact, of eight millions of English people, 
only a hundred and sixty thousand were electors at all. 

How far such a House was from really representing English 
opinion we see from the fact that in the height of his popularity 
Pitt could hardly find a seat in it. When he did find one, it was 
at the hands of a great borough-jobber. Lord Clive. Purchase 
was the real means of entering Parliament. Seats were bought 
and sold in the open market at a jorice which rose to four thou- 
sand pounds ; and we can hardly wonder that the younger Pitt 
cried indignantly at a later time, "This House is not the repre- 
sentative of the People of Great Britain. It is the representative 
of nominal boroughs, of ruined and exterminated towns, of noble 
families, of wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates." The mean- 
est motives naturally told on a body returned by such constituen- 
cies, cut off from the influence of public opinion by the secrecy of 
Parliamentary proceedings, and yet invested with almost bound- 
less authority. Newcastle had made bribery and borough-jobbing' 
the base of the power of the Whigs. George the Third seized it 
in his turn as the base of the power he purposed to give to the 
Crown, The Royal revenue was employed to buy seats and to buy 
votes. Day by day, George himself scrutinized the voting-list of 
the two Houses, and distributed rewards and punishments as mem- 
bers voted according to his will or not. Promotion in the civil 
service, preferment in the Church, or rank in the army was reserved 
for " the King's friends." Pensions and court places were used to 
influence debates. Bribery was employed on a scale never known 
before. Under Bute's ministry an office was opened at the Treas- 
ury for the bribery of members, and twenty-five thousand pounds 
are said to have been spent in a single day. 

The result of these measures was seen in the tone of the very 
Parliament which had till now bowed beneath tlie greatness of 
Pitt. In the teeth of his denunciations the Peace was approved 
by a majority of five to one. " Now, indeed, my son is king !" 
cried the Princess Dowager. But the victory was far from being 
won yet. So long as the sentiment of the House of Commons had 
fairly represented that of the nation at large, England had cared 
little for its abuses or its corruption. But the defeat of the Great 
Commoner disclosed the existence of a danger of which it had 
never dreamed. The country found itself powerless in the. face of 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



733 



a body which wielded the suiDreme authority in its name, but 
which had utterly ceased to be its representative. It looked on 
helplessly while the King, by sheer dint of corruption, turned the 
House which was the guardian of jDublic rights into a means of 
governing at his will. Parliament was the constitutional expres- 
sion of public opinion, and now public opinion was without the 
means of uttering itself in Parliament. The natural result follow- 
ed. The early years of George the Third were distinguished by 
a public discontent, by political agitation and disturbance, such as 
have never been known since. Bute found himself the object of 
a detestation so sudden and so universal in its outbreak as to force 
him to resign in 1763. The King, as frightened as his minister, 
saw that the time had not yet come for ruling by his own adher- 
ents alone, and appealed for aid to Pitt. But though he had been 
betrayed by Newcastle and his followers, Pitt saw clearly that 
without the support of the whole Whig party a minister would 
be, as Bute had been, a tool of the Crown ; and he made the re- 
turn of all its sections to office a condition of his own. George 
refused to comply with terms which would have defeated his de- 
signs ; and he was able to save himself from submission by skill- 
fully using the division which was rending the Whig camp into 
two opposite forces. The bulk of it, with Lord Rockingham and 
the Cavendishes at its head, leaned to Pitt and to the sympathy of 
the commercial classes. A smaller part, under George Grenville 
and the Duke of Bedford, retained the narrow and selfish temper 
of a mere oligarchy, in whom greed of power' overmastered every 
other feeling. In an evil hour George threw himself on the sup- 
port of the last. 

Of what moment his choice had been he Avas soon to learn. 
With Grenville's ministry began the political power of the Press 
and the struggle with America. The opinion of the country no 
sooner found itself unrepresented in Parliament than it sought an 
outlet in the Press. We have already noted the early history of 
English journalism, its rise under the Commonwealth, the censor- 
ship which fettered it, and the removal of this censorship after the 
Revolution. Under the two first Georges, its progress was hinder- 
ed by the absence of great topics for discussion, the worthlessness 
of its writers, and above all the political lethargy of the time. It 
was, in fact, not till the accession of George the Third that the im- 
pulse which Pitt had given to the national spirit and the rise of a 
keener interest in politics raised the Press into a political power. 
The new force of public opinion found in it a court of political ap- 
peal from the House of Commons. The journals became mouth- 
pieces for that outburst of popular hatred which drove Lord Bute 
from office in the teeth of his unbroken majority. The JSForth Brit- 
on, a journal written by John Wilkes, denounced the Peace with 
peculiar bitterness, and ventured for the first time to attack a min- 
ister by name. Wilkes was a worthless profligate, but he had a 
remarkable power of enlisting popular sympathy on his side, and 
by a singular -irony of fortune he became the chief instrument in 
brino-ins: about three of the greatest advances which our consti- 



734 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



tution has ever made. At a later time he awoke the nation to a 
conviction of the need for Parliamentary reform by his defense of 
the rights of constituencies against the despotism of the House of 
Commons, and he took the lead in the struggle which put an end 
to the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings. The prosecution of 
his, JSforth J3rit07i in 1764 first established the right of the Press to 
discuss public affairs. Wilkes was sent to prison on a " general 
warrant" from the Secretary of State. The legality of such a 
mode of arbitrary arrest by an officer of State, on a warrant 
which did not name the person to be arrested and which was not 
issued by a magistrate, Avas at once questioned, and no such war- 
rant has ever been issued since. A writ of habeas corpus freed 
Wilkes from prison, but he was soon prosecuted for libel, and the 
House of Commons condemned the paper, Avhich was still before 
the civil courts, as a " false, scandalous, and seditious libel." The 
House of Lords at the same time voted a pamphlet found among 
Wilkes's papers to be blasphemous, and advised a prosecution. 
Wilkes fled to France, and was soon expelled from the House of 
Commons. But the assumption of an arbitrary judicial power by 
both Houses, and the system of terror which Grenville put in force 
against the Press by issuing two hundred injunctions against dif- 
ferent journals, roused a storm of indignation throughout the coun- 
try. Every street resounded with cries of "Wilkes and Liberty." 
Bold as he was, Grenville dared go no further ; and six years later 
the failure of the prosecution directed against an anonymous jour- 
nalist named "Junius" for his Letter to the King established the 
right of the Press to criticise the conduct not of ministers or Par- 
liament only, but of the sovereign himself 

The same recklessness which was shown by Grenville in his^ 
struggle with the Press was shown in his struggle with the Amer- 
ican colonies. Pitt had waged war with characteristic profusion, 
and defrayed its expenses by enormous loans. The public debt 
now stood at a hundred and forty millions, and the first work of 
the Grenville Ministry was to make provision for the new burdens 
the nation had incurred. As the burden had been partly incurred 
in the defense of the American colonies, Grenville resolved that the 
colonies should bear their share of it. He raised the import duties 
at colonial ports. To deal with external commerce was generally 
held to be an unquestioned right of the mother country ; and, irri- 
tated as they were by these changes, the colonists submitted to 
them. A far heavier blow was dealt at their commerce by the 
rigid enforcement of the laws which restricted colonial trade to 
British ports, and the suppression of th'e illicit trade which had 
grown up with the Spanish settlements. The measure was a harsh 
and unwise one, but it was legal, and could only be resented.by a 
general pledge to use no British manufactures. But the next 
scheme of the Minister, his proposal to introduce internal taxation 
within the bounds of the colony itself by reviving the scheme of 
an excise or stamp duty which Walpole's good-sense had rejected, 
was met in another spirit. Taxation and representation, the colo- 
nists held, went hand in hand. America had no representatives in 



xo 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



735 



the British Parliament. The representatives of the colonists met 
in their own colonial Assemblies, and these were willing to grant 
supplies of a yet larger amount than a stamp-tax would produce. 
With this protest and offer they dispatched Benjamin Franklin, 
who had risen from his position of a working printer in Philadel- 
phia to high repute among scientific discoverers, as their agent to 
England. But his remonstrances only kindled Grenville's obstinacy, 
and the Stamp Act was passed in 1765. Franklin saw no other 
course for the colonies than submission, but submission was the 
last thing which the colonists dreamed of The Northern and 
Southern States were drawn together by the new danger. The 
Assembly of Virginia was the first to formally deny the right of 
the British Parliament to meddle with internal taxation, and to 
demand the repeal of the Act, Massachusetts not only adopted 
the denial and the demand as its own, but proposed a Congress of 
delegates from all the colonial Assemblies to provide for common 
and united action. In October, 1765, this Congress met to repeat 
the protest and petition of Virginia. 

For the moment this unexpected danger seemed to raise En- 
glish politics out of the chaos of faction and intrigue into which 
they were sinking. Not only had the Ministry incurred the ha- 
tred of the people, but the arrogance of Grenville had earned the 
resentment of the King. George again offered power to William 
Pitt. But Pitt stood almost alone. The silence of Newcastle 
and the Rockingham -party while the war and his past policy were 
censured in Parliament had estranged him from the only section 
of the Whigs which could have acted with him; and the one 
friend who remained to him, his brother-in-law, Lord Temple, re- 
fused to aid in an attempt to construct a cabinet. The King had 
no resource but to turn to the Marquis of Rockingham and the 
Whig party which he headed ; but Rockingham had hardly taken 
office in July, 1765, when the startling news came from America 
that Congress had resolved on resistance. Its resolution had been 
followed by action. No sooner had the stamps for the new Ex- 
cise arrived in Boston than they were seized and held in custody 
by the magistrates of the town. The news at once called Pitt to 
the front. As a Minister he had long since rejected a similar 
scheme for taxing the colonies. He had been ill and absent from 
Parliament when the Stamp Act was passed, but he adopted to 
the full the constitutional claim of America. He gloried in the 
resistance which was denounced in Parliament as rebellion. " In 
my opinion," he said, " this kingdom has no right to lay a tax on 
the colonies. . . . America is obstinate ! America is almost in open 
rebellion ! Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted. Three mill- 
ions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily 
to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make 
slaves of the rest." His words determined the action of the timid 
Ministry, and, in spite of the resistance of the King and the "King's 
friends," the Stamp Act was formally repealed in 1766. But the 
doctrine he had laid down was as formally repudiated by a De- 
claratory Act passed at the same time which asserted the supreme 

47 



736 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



power of Parliament over the colonies "in all cases whatso- 
ever." 

From this moment the Ministry was unable to stand against 
the general sense that the first man in the country should be its 
ruler. Pitt's aim was still to unite the Whig party, and, though 
forsaken by Lord Temple, he succeeded to a great extent in the 
administration which he formed in the summer of 1766. Rock- 
ingham, indeed, refused office, but the bulk of his fellow-ministers 
remained, and they were reinforced by the few friends who clung 
to Pitt. In his zeal to bring all parties together, even some of the 
Court party were admitted to minor offices in the administration, 
a step which won the warm approbation of the King as likely to 
destroy " all party distinctions." Never had the hopes of a wise 
and noble government been stronger, and never were they fated 
to be more signally foiled. The life of the Ministry lay in Pitt, 
in his immense popularity, and in the command which his elo- 
quence gave him over the House of Commons. His acceptance 
of the Earldom of Chatham removed him to the House of Lords, 
and for a while ruined the confidence which his reputation for un- 
selfishness had enabled him to win. But it was from no vulgar 
ambition that Pitt laid down his title of the Great Commoner. It 
was the consciousness of failing strength which made him dread 
the storms of debate, and in a few months the dread became a 
certainty. A painful and overwhelming illness, the result of nerv- 
ous disorganization, withdrew him from public affairs ; and his 
withdrawal robbed his colleagues of all vigor or union. The plans 
which Chatham had set on foot for the better government of Ire- 
land, the transfer of India from the Company to the Crown, and 
the formation of a Northern Alliance with Prussia and Russia \o 
balance the Family Compact of the House of Bourbon, were suf- 
fered to drop. The one aim of the Ministry was to exist. It 
sought strength by the readmission of George Grenville and the 
Bedford party to office. But this practical abandonment of the 
policy of Pitt was soon followed by the retirement of his friends 
and of the chief of the Rockingham Whigs. A series of changes 
which it is needless to recount in detail left it practically a joint 
Ministry of the worst faction of the Whigs and of the new party 
Avhicli had been slowly gathering strength under the name of the 
" King's friends." In spite, howeVer, of the worthlessness and medi- 
ocrity of its members, this Ministry lasted, under the successive 
guidance of the Duke of Grafton and Lord North, for nearly eight 
years — from 1768 to the close of the American War. 

Its strength lay in the disorganization of the Whig party and 
the steady support of the King. George the Third had at last 
reached his aim. Pitt was discredited and removed for a time 
from the stage. The Whigs under Rockingham were fatally di- 
vided both from him and from the Bedford party. If the Bedfords 
were again in office it was on the condition of doing the King's 
will. Their Parliamentary support lay in the Tories and the 
"King's friends," who looked for direction to George himself In 
the early days of the Ministry his influence was felt to be piedom- 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



737 



inant. In its later and more disastrous days it was supreme, for 
Lord North, who became the head of the Ministry on Grafton's re- 
tirement in 1770, was the mere mouthpiece of the King. "Not 
only did he direct the Minister," a careful observer tells us, " in all 
important matters of foreign and domestic policy, but he instruct- 
ed him as to the management of debates in Parliament, suggested 
what motions should be made or opposed, and how measures should 
be carried. He reserved for himself all the patronage, he arranged 
the Avhole cast of the administration, settled the relative place and 
pretensions of ministers of State, law officers, and members of 
the household, nominated and promoted the English and Scotch 
judges, appointed and translated bishops and deans, and dispensed 
other preferments in the Church. He disposed of military govern- 
ments, regiments, and commissions, and himself ordered the march- 
ing of troops. He gave and refused titles, honors, and pensions." 
All this immense patronage was steadily used for the creation and 
maintenance of a party in both Houses of Parliament attached to 
the King himself; and its weight was seen in the dependence to 
which the new Ministry was reduced. George was, in fact, sole 
Minister during the fifteen years which followed ; and the shame 
of the darkest hour of English history lies wholly at his door. 

Again, as in 1763, the Government which he directed plunged at 
his instigation into a struggle with opinion at home and with the 
colonists of America. The attempt of the House of Commons to 
gag the Press and to transform itself into a supreme court of jus- 
tice had been practically foiled. It now began the most daring- 
attack ever made, by a body professing to be representative, on the 
rights of those whom it represented. In 1768 Wilkes returned from 
France, and was elected member for Middlesex, a county the large 
number of whose voters made its choice a real expression of public 
opinion. The choice of Wilkes was in effect a public condemnation 
of the House of Commons. The Ministry shrank from a fresh strug- 
gle with the agitator, but the King was eager for the contest. "I 
think it highly expedient to apprise you," he wrote to Lord North, 
"that the expulsion of Mr. Wilkes appears to be very essential, and 
must be effected." The Ministers and the House of Commons 
bowed to his will. By his non-appearance in court when charged 
with libel Wilkes had become an outlaw, and he was now thrown 
into prison on his outlawry. Dangerous riots broke out in London 
and over the whole country; but the Government persevered. In 
1769 the House of Commons expelled Wilkes as a libeler. He 
was at once re-elected by the shire of Middlesex. Violent and op- 
pressive as the course of the House of Commons had been, it had 
as yet acted within its strict right, for no one questioned its pos- 
session of a right of expulsion. But the defiance of Middlesex led 
it now to go farther. It resolved, "That Mr. Wilkes having been 
in this session of Parliament expelled the House, was and is incapa- 
ble of being elected a member to serve in the present Parliament;" 
and it issued a writ for a fresh election. Middlesex answered this 
insolent claim to limit the free choice of a constituency by again 
returning Wilkes ; and the House Avas driven by its anger to 



'738 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



a fresh and more outrageous usurpation. It again expelled the 
member for Middlesex ; and on his return for the third time by an 
immense majority, it voted that the candidate whom he had de- 
feated, Colonel Luttrell, ought to have been returned, and was the 
legal representative of Middlesex. The Commons had not only 
limited at their own arbitrary discretion the free election of the 
constituency, but they had transferred its rights to themselves by 
seating Luttrell as member in defiance of the deliberate choice of 
Wilkes by the freeholders of Middlesex. The country at once rose 
indignantly against this violation of constitutional law. Wilkes 
was elected an Alderman of London ; and the Mayor, Aldermen, 
and Livery petitioned the King to dissolve the Parliament. A re- 
monstrance from London and Westminster said boldly that " there 
is' a time when it is clearly demonstrable that men cease to be rep- 
resentatives. That time is now arrived. The House of Commons 
do not represent the people," Junius, an anonymous writer, attack- 
ed the Government in letters which, rancorous and unscrupulous 
as was their tone, gave a new power to the literature of the Press 
by their clearness and terseness of statement, the finish of their 
style, and the terrible vigor of their invective. 

The storm, however, beat idly on the obstinacy of the King. Ju- 
nius was prosecuted, and the petitions and remonstrances of Lon- 
don haughtily rejected. At the beginning of 1*770, however, a ces- 
sation of the disease which had long held him prostrate enabled 
Chatham to reappear in the House of Lords, He at once denounced 
the usurpations of the Commons, and brought in a bill to de- 
clare them illegal. But his genius made him the first to see that 
remedies of this sort were inadequate to meet evils which really 
sprang from the fact that the House of Commons no longer rep- 
resented the people of England. He brought forward a plan for 
its reform by an increase of the county members. Farther he 
could not go, for even in the proposals he made he stood almost 
alone. Even the Whigs under Lord Rockingham had no sym- 
pathy with Parliamentary reform. They shrank with haughty 
disdain from the popular agitation in which public opinion was 
forced to express itself, and which Chatham, while censuring its ex- 
travagance, deliberately encouraged. It is from the quarrels be- 
tween Wilkes and the House of Commons that we may date the 
influence of public meetings on English politics. The gatherings 
of the Middlesex electors in his support were preludes to the great 
meetings of the Yorkshire freeholders in which the question of Par- 
liamentary reform rose into importance; and it was in the move- 
ment for reform, and the establishment of corresponding commit- 
tees throughout the country for the purpose of promoting it, 
that the power of political agitation first made itself felt. Politic- 
al societies and clubs took their part in the creation and organiza- 
tion of public opinion ; and the spread of discussion, as Avell as the 
influence which now began to be exercised by the appearance of 
vast numbers of men in support of any political movement, proved 
that Parliament would soon have to reckon with the sentiments of 
the people at large. • 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



739 



But an agent fai* more effective than popular agitation was pre- 
paring to bring the force of public opinion to bear on Parliament 
itself. We have seen how much of the corruption of the House 
of Commons sprang from the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings, 
but the secrecy was the harder to preserve as the nation awoke to 
a greater interest in its own affairs. From the accession of the 
Georges imperfect reports of the more important discussions be- 
gan to be published under the title of "The Senate of Lilliput," 
and Avith feigned names or simple initials to denote the speaker. 
Obtained by stealth and often merely recalled by memory, these 
reports were naturally inaccurate ; and their inaccuracy was eager- 
ly seized on as a pretext for enforcing the rules which guarded the 
secrecy of proceedings in Parliament. In 1771 the Commons is- 
sued a proclamation forbidding the publication of debates; and six 
printers, who set it at defiance, were summoned to the bar of the 
House. One who refused to appear was arrested by its messen- 
ger; but the arrest at once brought the House into conflict with 
the magistrates of London. They set aside the proclamation as 
without legal force, released the printers, and sent the messenger 
to prison for an unlawful arrest. The House sent the Lord Mayor 
to the Tower, but the cheers of the crowds which folloAved him on 
his way told that public opinion was again with the Press, and 
the attempt to hinder its publication of Parliamentary proceedings 
dropped silently on his release at the next prorogation. Few 
changes of equal importance have been so quietly brought about. 
Not only was the responsibility of members to their constituents 
made constant and effective by the publication of their proceedings, 
but the nation itself was called in to assist in the deliberations of 
its representatives. A new and wider-interest in its own affairs 
was roused in the people at large, and a new political education 
was given to it through the discussion of every subject of nation- 
al importance in the Houses and the Press. Public opinion, as 
gathered up and represented on all its sides by the journals of the 
day, became a force in practical statesmanship, influenced the 
course of debates, and controlled in a closer and more constant 
way than even Parliament itself had been able to do the actions 
of the Government. The importance of its new position gave a 
weight to the Press Avhich it had never had before. The first 
great English journals date from this time. With the Morning 
Chronicle., the Morning Post, the Morning Herald, and the Times, 
all of which appeared in the inteiwal between the opening years 
of the American War and the beginning of the war with the 
French Revolution, journalism took a new tone of responsibility 
and intelligence. The hacks of Grub Sti'eet were superseded by 
publicists of a high moral temper and literary excellence; and 
philosophers like Coleridge or statesmen like Canning turned to 
influence public opinion through the columns of the Press. 

But as yet these influences were feebly felt, and George the 
Third was able to set Chatham's protests disdainfully aside, and 
to plunge into a contest far more disastrous for the fortunes of 
England. In all the wretched chaos of the last few years, what 



740 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



had galled him most had been the one noble act which averted a 
wai" between England and her colonies. To the King the Ameri- 
cans were already "rebels," and the great statesman whose elo- 
quence had made their claims irresistible was a " trumpet of se- 
dition." George deplored, in his correspondence with Lord North, 
the repeal of the Stamp Act. " All men feel," he wrote, " that 
the fatal compliance in 1766 has increased the pretensions of the 
Americans to absolute independence." In America itself the news 
of the repeal had been received with universal joy, and taken as a 
close of the strife. But on both sides there remained a pride and 
irritability which only wise handling could have allayed ; and in 
the present state of English politics wise handling was impossible. 
No sooner had the illness of Lord Chatham removed him from any 
real share in public affairs than the wretched administration which 
still bore his name suspended the Assembly of New York on its 
refusal to provide quarters for English troops, and resolved to as- 
sert British sovereignty by levying import duties of trivial amount 
at American ports. The Assembly of Massachusetts was dissolved 
on a trifling quarrel witli its Governor, and Boston was occupied 
for a time by British soldiers. The remonstrances of the Legisla- 
tures of Massachusetts and Virginia, however, coupled with a fall 
in the funds, warned the Ministers of the dangerous course on which 
they had entered; and in 1769 the troops were withdrawn, and 
all duties, save that on tea, abandoned. A series of petty quarrels 
went on in almost every colony between the popular Assemblies 
and the Governors appointed by the Crown, and the colonists per- 
severed in their agreement to import nothing from the mother 
country. But for three years there was no prospect of serious 
strife. In America the influence of George Washington allayed 
the irritation of Virginia. Massachusetts contented itself with 
quarreling with the Governor, and refusing to buy tea so long as 
the duty was levied. In England, even Grenville, though approv- 
ing the retention of the duty in question, abandoned all di'eam of 
further taxation. But the King was supreme, and the fixed pur- 
pose of the King was to seize on the first opportunity of undoing 
the "fatal compliance of 1766." 

A trivial riot gave him the handle he wanted. He had insisted 
on the tea duty being retained when the rest were withdrawn, 
and in December, 1773, the arrival of some English ships laden 
with tea kindled fresh irritation in Boston, where the non-impor- 
tation agi-eement was strictly enforced. A mob in the disguise 
of Indians boarded the vessels and flung their contents into the 
sea. The outrage was deplored alike by the friends of America 
in England and by its own leading statesmen ; and both Wash- 
ington and Chatham were prepared to support the Government 
in its looked-for demand of redress. But the thought of the King 
was not of redress, but of repression, and he set roughly aside the 
more conciliatory pi'oposals of Lord North and his fellow-minis- 
ters. They had already rejected as " frivolous and vexatious " 
a petition of the Assembly of Massachusetts for the dismissal of 
two public officers whose letters home advised the withdrawal 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



741 



of free institutions from the colonies. They now seized on the 
riot as a pretext for rigorous measures. A bill introduced into 
Parliament in the beginning of 1774 punished Boston by closing 
its port against all commerce. Another jDunished the State of 
Massachusetts by withdrawing the liberties it had enjoyed ever 
since the Pilgrim Fathers landed on its soil. Its charter was al- 
tered. The choice of its Council was transferred from the people" \ 
to the Crown, and the nomination of its judges was transferred 
to the Governor. In the Governor, too, by a provision more out- 
rageous than even these, was vested the right of sending all per- 
sons charged with a share in the late disturbances to England for 
trial. To enforce these measures of repression troops were sent 
to America, and General Gage, the commander-in-chief there, was 
appointed Governor of Massachusetts. The King's exultation at 
the prospect before him was unbounded. " The die," he wrote 
triumphantly to his Minister, " is cast. The colonies must either 
triumph or submit." Four regiments would be enough to bring 
Americans to their senses. They would only be " lions while we 
are lambs." " If we take the resolute part," he decided solemnly, 
" they will undoubtedly be very meek." Unluckily, the blow at 
Massachusetts was received with any thing but meekness. The 
jealousies between State and State were hushed by the sense that 
the liberties of all were in danger. If the British Parliament 
could cancel the charter of Massachusetts and ruin the trade of 
Boston, it could cancel the charter of every colony and* ruin the 
trade of every port from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. 
All, therefore, adopted the cause of Massachusetts ; and all their 
Legislatures, save that of Georgia, sent delegates to a Congress 
which assembled on the 4th of September at Philadelphia. Mas- 
sachusetts took a yet bolder course. Not a citizen would act un- 
der the new laws. Its Assembly met in defiance of the Governor, 
called out the militia of the State, and provided arms and ammu- 
nition for it. But there Avas still room for reconciliation. The 
resolutions of the Congress had been moderate ; for Virginia was 
the wealthiest and most influential among the States wiio sent 
delegates ; and Virginia, under Washington's guidance, though res- 
olute to resist the new measures of the Government, still clung 
to the mother country. At home, the merchants of London and 
Bristol pleaded loudly for reconciliation; and in January, 1775, 
Chatham again came forward to avert the strife he had once be- 
fore succeeded in preventing. With characteristic grandeur of 
feeling he set aside all half-measures or proposals of compromise. 
" It is not canceling a piece of parchment," he insisted, " that 
can win back America : you must respect her fears and her re- 
sentments." The bill which he introduced in concert with Frank- 
lin provided for the repeal of the late Acts and for the security 
of the colonial charters, abandoned the claim to taxation, and 
ordered the recall of the troops. A colonial Assembly Avas di- 
rected to assemble and provide means by which America might 
contribute toward the payment of the public debt. 

The contemptuous rejection of Chatham's measure began the 



742 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



great struggle which ended eight years later in the severance of 
the American Colonies from the British Crown. The Congress 
of delegates from the Colonial Legislatures at once voted meas- 
ures for general defense, ordered the levy of an army, and set 
George Washington at its head. No nobler figure ever stood 
in the forefront of a nation's life. Washington was grave and 
courteous in address ; his manners were simple and unpretend- 
ing ; his silence and the serene calmness of his temper spoke of 
a perfect self-mastery ; but there was little in his outer bearing 
to reveal the grandeur of soul which lifts his figure, with all the 
simple majesty of an ancient statue, out of the smaller passions, 
the meaner impulses of the world around him. What recom- 
mended him for command as yet was simply his weight among 
his fellow -landowners of Virginia, and the experience of war 
which he had gained by service in Braddock's luckless expedition 
against Fort Duquesne. It was only as the weary fight went on 
that the colonists learned little by little the greatness of their leader 
— his clear judgment, his heroic endurance, his silence under difli- 
culties, his calmness in the hour of danger or defeat, the patience 
with which he waited, the quickness and hardness with which he 
struck, the lofty and serene sense of duty that never swerved 
from its task through resentment or jealousy, that never through 
war or peace felt the touch of a meaner ambition, that knew no 
aim save that of guarding the freedom of his fellow-countrymen, 
and no personal longing save that of returning to his own fire- 
side when their freedom was secured. It was almost uncon- 
sciously that men learned to cling to Washington with a trust 
and faith such as few other men have won, and to regard him 
with a reverence which still hushes us in presence of his memory. ' 
Even America hardly recognized his real grandeur till death 
set its seal on " the man first in war, first in peace, and first 
in the hearts of his countrymen." Washington, more than any 
of his fellow -colonists, represented the clinging of the Virginia 
landowners to the mother country, and his acceptance of the 
command proved that even the most moderate among them had 
no hope now save in arms. The struggle opened with a skirmish 
between a party of English troops and a detachment of militia 
at Lexington, and in a few days twenty thousand colonists ap- 
peared before Boston. The Congress reassembled, declared the 
States they represented " The United Colonies of America," an#% 
undertook the work of government. Meanwhile ten thousand 
fresh troops landed at Boston ; but the provincial militia seized 
the neck of ground which joins it to the mainland, and though 
they were driven from the heights of Bunker's Hill, which com- 
manded the town, it was only after a desperate struggle, in Avhich 
their bravery put an end forever to the taunts of cowardice 
which had been leveled against the colonists. "Are the Yankees 
cowards ?" shouted the men of Massachusetts, as the first En- 
glish attack rolled back baffled down the hill-side. But a far truer 
courage Avas shown in the stubborn endurance with Avhich six- 
teen thousand raw militiamen, who gradually dwindled to ten, 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



r43 



ill-fed and ill- armed, with but forty-five rounds of ammunition 
to each man, cooped up through the winter, under Washington's 
command, a force often thousand veterans in the lines of Boston, 
till the spring of 1776 saw them withdraw from the city to New 
York, where the whole British army, largely reinforced by mer- 
cenaries from Germany, was concentrated under General Howe. 
Meanwhile a raid of the American General Arnold nearly drove 
the British troops from Canada ; and though his attempt broke 
down before Quebec, it showed that all hope of reconciliation was 
over. The colonies of the South, the last to join in the struggle, 
expelled their Governors at the close of 1775. This decisive step 
was followed by the great act Avith which American history be- 
gins, the adoption on the 4th of July, 1776, by the delegates in 
Congress of the Declaration of Independence. " We," ran its 
solemn words, " the representatives of the United States of Amer- 
ica in Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the 
world for the rectitude of our intentions, solemnly publish and de- 
clare that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, 
Free and Independent States." 

The triumph of the colonies was soon followed by suffering and 
defeat. Howe, an active general, with a fine army at his back, 
cleared Long Island in August by a victory at Brooklyn; and 
Washington, whose army was weakened by withdrawals and de- 
feat, and disheartened by the loyal tone of the State in which it 
was encamped, was forced to evacuate New York and Nev/ Jer- 
sey, and to fall back, first on the Hudson and then on the Dela- 
ware. The Congress prepared to fly from Philadelphia, and a 
general despair showed itself in cries of peace. But a well-man- 
aged surprise at Trenton, and a daring march on the rear of Plowe's 
army at Princeton, restored the spirits of Washington's men, and 
forced the English general in his turn to fall back on New York. 
The spring of 1777 opened with a combined effort for the suppres- 
sion of the revolt. An army, assembled in Canada under General 
Burgoyne, marched by way of the Lakes to seize the line of the 
Hudson, and with help from the army at New York to cut off New 
England from her sister provinces. Howe meanwhile sailed up 
the Chesapeake, and marched on Philadelphia, the temporary cap- 
ital of the United States and the seat of the Congress. The rout 
of his little army of seven thousand men at Brandywine forced 
^Washington to abandon Philadelphia, and after a bold but unsuc- 
cessful attack on his victors at Germanstown to retire into winter- 
quarters on the banks of the Schuylkill. The unconquerable re- 
solve with which he nerved his handful of beaten and half starved 
troops in their camp at Valley Forge to face Howe's army through 
the winter is the noblest of Washington's triumphs. But in tbe 
north the war had taken another color. When Burgoyne appear- 
ed on the Upper Hudson he found the road to Albany barred by 
an American force under General Gates. The spirit of New En- 
gland, which had grown dull as the Avar rolled aAvay from its bor- 
ders, quickened again at the ncAVS of invasion and of the outrages 
committed by the Indians Avhora Burgoyne employed among his 



744 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



troops. Its militia hurried from town and homestead to the camp; 
and, after a fruitless attack on the American lines, Burgoyne saw 
himself surrounded on the heights of Saratoga. On the 13th of 
October he was compelled to surrender. The news of this terri- 
ble calamity gave force to the words with which Chatham at the 
very time of the surrender was pressing for peace. " You can not 
conquer America," he cried when men were glorying in Howe's 
successes. "If I were an American as I am an Englisliman, while 
a foi'eign troop was landed in ray country, I never would lay down 
my arms — never, never, never !" Then, in a burst of indignant elo- 
quence, he thundered against the nse of the Indian and his scalp- 
ing-knife as allies of England against her children. The proposals 
which Chatham brought forward might, perhaps, in his hands even 
yet have brought America and the mother country together. His 
plan was one of absolute conciliation, and of a federal union be- 
tween the settlements and Great Britain which would have left 
the colonies absolutely their own masters in all matters of internal 
government, and linked only by ties of affection and loyalty to the 
general body of the Empire. But it met with the same fate as his 
previous proposals. Its rejection was at once followed by the 
news of Saratoga, and by the yet more fatal news that the disaster 
had roused the Bourbon Courts to avenge the humiliation of the 
Seven-Years' War. In February, 1778, France concluded an alli- 
ance with the States, and that of Spain followed after a year's de- 
lay. Even in the minds of the Ministers themselves all hope of 
conquering America had disappeared. The King, indeed, was as 
obstinate for war as ever; and the country, stung by its great 
humiliation, sent fifteen thousand men to the ranks of the army. 
But even the King's influence broke down before the general de- ' 
spair. Lord North carried through Parliament bills which con- 
ceded to America all she had originally claimed. The Duke of 
Richmond and a large number of the Whigs openly advocated the 
acknowledgment of American independence. If a hope still re- 
mained of retaining the friendship of the colonies and of baffling 
the efforts of France and Spain, it lay in Lord Chatham, and in 
spite of the King's resistance the voice of the whole country called 
him back to power. But on the eve of his return to office this last 
chance was shattered by the hand of death. The day for which 
George the Third only two years before had longed was come. 
Broken with age and disease, the Earl was borne to the House (rf- 
Lords on the 7th of April, and uttered in a few broken words his 
protest against the proposal to surrender America. "His Majes- 
ty," he murmured, " succeeded to an Empire as great in extent as 
its reputation was unsullied. Seventeen years ago this people 
was the terror of the world." Then, falling back in a swoon, he 
was borne home to die. 

From the hour of Chatham's death England entered on a con- 
flict Avith enemies whose circle gradually widened till she stood 
single-handed against the world. In 1778, France and Spain were 
leagued with America against her. Their joint fleet of sixty ships 
rode the masters of the Cliannel, and threatened a descent on the 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



745 



English coast. But dead as Chatham was, his cry awoke a new 
life in England. " Shall we fall prostrate," he exclaimed with his 
last breath, " before the House of Bourbon?" and the divisions 
which had broken the nation in its struggle with American liberty 
vanished at a threat of French invasion. The weakness of the 
Ministry was compensated by the heroic energy of the nation it- 
self. For three years, from 1779 to 1782, General Elliot held 
against famine and bombardment the rock-fortress of Gibraltar. 
Although a quarrel over tlie right of search banded Holland and 
the Courts of the Nortli in an armed neutrality against her, and 
added the Dutch fleet to the number of her assailants, England 
held her own at sea. E\\in in America the fortune of the war 
seemed to turn. After Burgoyne's surrender the English generals 
had withdrawn from Pennsylvania, and bent all their efforts on 
the South, where a strong Royalist party still existed. The capture 
of Charleston and the successes of Lord Cornwallis in 1780 were 
rendered fruitless by the obstinate resistance of General Greene ; 
but the States were weakened by bankruptcy and unnerved by 
hopes of aid from France. Meanwhile the losses of England in 
the West were all but compensated for by new triumphs in the 
East. 

Since the day of Plassey, India had been fast passing into the 
hands of the merchant Company whose traders but a few years 
before held only three petty factories along its coast. The victory 
which laid Bengal at the feet of Clive had been followed in 1760 
by a victory at Wandewash, in which Colonel Coote's defeat of 
Lally, the French Governor of Pondicherry, established* British 
supremacy over Southern India. The work of organization had 
soon tO' follow on that of conquest; for the tyranny and corrup- 
tion of the merchant-clerks who suddenly found themselves lifted 
into rulers were fast ruining the pi'ovince of Bengal; and although 
Clive had profited more than any other by the spoils of his victor}'-, 
he saw that the time had come when greed must give way to the 
responsibilities of power. In 1765 he returned to India, and the 
two years of his rule were, in fact, the most glorious years in his 
life. In the teeth of opposition from every clerk and of mutiny 
throughout the army, he put down the private trading of the Com- 
pany's servants and forbade their acceptance of gifts from the na- 
tives. Clive set an example of disinterestedness by handing over 
to public uses a legacy which had been left him by the prince lie 
had raised to the throne of Bengal ; and returned poorer than he 
went to face the storm his acts had roused among those who were 
interested in Indian abuses at home. His uns23aring denunciations 
of the misgovernment of Bengal at last stirred even Lord North 
to interfere ; and when the financial distress of the Company drove 
it for aid to Government, the grant of aid was coupled with meas- 
ures of administrative reform. The Regulation Act of 1773 es- 
tablished a Governor-General and a Supreme Court of Judicature 
for all British possessions in India, prohibited judges and members 
of Council fi'om trading, forbade any receipt of presents from na- 
tives, and ordered that every act of the Directors should be signi- 



HG 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



fied to the Government to be approved or disallowed. The new 
interest which had been aroused in the subject of India was seen 
in an investigation of the whole question of its administration by 
a Committee of the House of Commons. Clive's own early acts 
were examined with unsparing severity. His bitter complaint in 
the Lords that, Baron of Plassey as he was, he had been ari-aigned 
like a sheep-stealer, failed to prevent the passing of resolutions 
which censured the corruption and treachery of the early days of 
British rule in India. Here, however, the justice of the House 
stopped. When his accusers passed from the censure of Indian 
misgovernment to the censure of Clive himself, the memory of his 
great deeds won from the Plouse of Commons a unanimous vote, 
"That Robert Lord Clive did at the same time render great and 
meritorious services to his country." 

By the Act of 1773 Warren Hastings was named Governor-Gen- 
eral of the three presidencies. Hastings was sprung of a noble 
family which had long fallen into decay, and poverty had driven 
him in boyhood to accept a writership in the Company's service. 
Clive, whose quick eye discerned his merits, drew him after Plas- 
sey into political life; and the administrative ability he showed, 
during the disturbed period which followed, raised him step by 
step to the post of Governor of Bengal. IsTo man could have been 
better fitted to discharge the duties of the new office which the 
Government at home had created without a thought of its real 
greatness. Hastings was gifted with rare powers of organization 
and control. Plis first measure was to establish the direct rule of 
the Company over Bengal by abolishing the government of its 
native princes, which, though it had become nominal, hindered all 
plans for effective administration. The Nabob sank into a pen- 
sionary, and the Company's new province was roughly but efficient- 
ly organized. Out of the clerks and traders about him Hastings 
formed that body of public servants which still remains the noblest 
product of our rule in India. The system of law and finance which 
he devised, hasty and imperfect as it necessarily was, was far su- 
perior to any that India had ever seen. Corruption he put down 
with as firm a hand as Clive's, but he won the love of the now 
" civilians " as he won the love of the Hindoos. Although he 
raised the revenue of Bengal, and was able to send home every 
year a surplus of half a million to the Company, he did this with- 
out laying a fresh burden on the natives or losing their good-will. 
His government was guided by an intimate knowledge of and 
sympathy Avith the people. At a time when their tongue was 
looked on simply as a medium of trade and business, Hastings 
was skilled in the languages of India, he was vei'sed in native cus- 
toms, and familiar with native feeling. We can hardly wonder 
that his popularity with the Bengalees was such as no later ruler 
has ever attained, or that after a century of great events Indian 
mothers still hush their infants with the name of Warren Has- 
tings. 

With Hastings began the conscious and deliberate purpose of 
subjecting India to the British Crown. As yet, though English 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



lAI 



influence was great in the south, Bengal alone was directly in En- 
glish hands. The policy of Warren Hastings looked forward to a 
time when England should be absolute mistress of the whole of 
Hindostan, from Ceylon to the Himalayas. For this he bound na- 
tive princes, as in Oude or Berar, by treaties and subsidies, crushed 
without scruple every state which, like that of the Rohillas, seemed 
to afford a nucleus for resistance, and watched with incessant jeal- 
ousy the growth of powers even as distant as the Sikhs. The 
American War surprised him in the midst of vast schemes which 
were to be carried out by later Governors, and hurried him into 
immediate action. The jealousy of France sought a counterpoise 
to the power of Britain in that of the Mahrattas, freebooters of 
Hindoo blood whose tribes had for a century past carried their 
raids over India from the hills of the western coast, and founded 
sovereignties in Guzerat, Malwa, and Tanjore. All were bound 
by a slight tie of subjection to the Mahratta chief who reigned at 
Poonah, and it was through this chieftain that the French envoys 
were able to set the whole confederacy in motion against the En- 
glish presidencies. The danger was met by Hastings with char- 
acteristic swiftness of resolve. His difficulties were great. For 
two years he had been rendered powerless through the opposition 
of his Council ; and when freed from this obstacle the Company 
pressed him incessantly for money, and the Crown more than once 
strove to recall him. His own general, Sir Eyre Coote, was miser- 
ly, capricious, and had to be humored like a child. Censures and 
complaints reached him with every mail. • But his calm self-com- 
mand never failed. No trace of his embarrassments showed itself 
in his work. The war with the Mahrattas was pressed with a te- 
nacity of purpose which the blunders of subordinates and the in- 
efficiency of the soldiers he was forced to use never shook for a 
moment. Failure followed failure, and success had hardly been 
wrung from fortune when a new and overwhelming danger threat- 
ened from the south. A military adventurer, Hyder Ali, had built 
up a comi^act and vigorous empire out of the wreck of older prin- 
cipalities on the table-land of Mysore. Tyrant as he was, no na- 
tive rule was so just as Hyder's, no statesmanship so vigorous. 
He was quickwitted enough to discern the real power of Britain, 
and only the wretched blundering of the Council of Madras forced 
him at last to the conclusion that war with the English was less 
dangerous than friendship with them. Old as he was, his general- 
ship retained all its energy; and a disciplined army, covered by a 
cloud of horse and backed by a train of artillery, poured down in 
1780 on the plain of the Carnatic. The small British force which 
met him was driven into Madras, and Madras itself was in danger. 
The news reached Hastings when lie was at last on the verge of 
triumph over the Mahrattas; but his triumph was instantly aban- 
doned, a peace was patched up, and every soldier hurried to Ma- 
dras. The appearance of Eyre Coote checked the progress of Hy- 
der, and in 1V81 the victory of Porto Novo hurled him back into 
the fastnesses of Mysore. India was the one quarter of the Avorld 
where Britain lost nothing during the American War ; and though 



"748 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the Bcliemes of conquest which Hastings had formed were for the 
moment frustrated, the annexation of Benares, the extension of 
British dominions along the Ganges, the reduction of Oude to virt- 
ual dependence, the appearance of English armies in Central In- 
dia, and the defeat of Hyder, laid the foundation of an Indian Em- 
pire which his genius was bold enough to foresee. 

But while England triumphed in the East, the face of the war 
in America Avas changed by a terrible disaster. Foiled in an at- 
tempt on North Carolina by the refusal of his fellow-general, Sir 
H. Clinton, to assist him, Lord Cornwallis fell back in I'/Sl on 
Virginia, and intrenched himself in the lines of Yorktown. A 
sudden march of Washington brought him to the front of the 
Eno-lish troops at a moment when the French fleet held the sea, 
and the army of Cornwallis was driven by famine to a surrender 
as humiliating as that of Saratoga. The news fell like a thunder- 
bolt on the wretched Minister who had till now suppressed at his 
master's order his own conviction of the uselessness of further 
bloodshed. Opening his arms and pacing wildly up and down 
his room. Lord North exclaimed, " It is all over," and resigned. 
En<>-land, in fact, seemed on the brink of ruin. Even Ireland turn- 
ed on her. A force of Protestant Volunteers which had been 
raised for the defense of the island, and had rapidly grown to a 
hundred thousand men, demanded the repeal of Poyning's Act 
and the recognition of the Irish House of Lords as a final Court 
of Ap^peal. The demand was in effect a claim of Irish independ- 
ence ; but there was no means of resisting it, for England was 
destitute of any force which she could oppose to the Volunteers. 
The hopes of her enemies rose high. Spain refused peace at any 
other price than the surrender of Gibraltar. France proposed ^ 
that England should give up all her Indian conquests save Ben- 
gal. But at this moment the victories of Admiral Rodney, the 
greatest of English seamen save Nelson and Blake, saved the 
country from a dishonorable peace. He encountered the Spanish 
fleet off Cape St. Vincent, and only four of its vessels escaped t^o 
Cadiz. The triumphs of the French Admiral De Grasse called 
him to the West Indies, and on the 12th of April, 1'782, a manoeu- 
vre which he was the first to inti-oduce broke his opponent's line 
and drove the French fleet, shattered, from the sea. The final re- 
pulse of the allied armament before Gibraltar in September end- 
ed the war. In November the Treaties of Paris and Versailles, 
while yielding nothing to France, and only Minorca and Florida 
to Spain, acknowledged without reserve the independence of 
America. 



Section III.— Tiie Second Fitt. 1783—1789. 

\_Authorities. — Mr. Massey's account of this period may be supplemented by Lord 
Stanhope's " Life of Pitt," Macknight's "Life of Burke," Lord Eussell's " Memoirs 
of Fox," and the Correspondence of Lord Malmesbury, Lord Auckland, and Mr. 
Kose. Tor the Slave-trade, see the Memoirs of Wilberforce by his sons. Burke 
may be studied in his Life by Macknight, in Mr. Morley's valuable essay on him, 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



749 



and above all in his own works. The state of foreign affairs in 1789 is hest seen in 
Von Sybel's " History of the French Revolution."] 



The larger and world-wide issues of the establishment of Amer- 
ican Independence lie beyond the scope of the present work, nor 
can we dwell here on the political and social influence which 
America has exercised ever since on the mother country itself. 
What startled men most at the time was the discovery that En- 
gland was not ruined by the loss of her colonies or by the complete- 
ness of her defeat. She rose from it indeed stronger and greater 
than ever. The next ten years saw a display of industrial activity 
such as the world had never witnessed before. During the twenty 
which followed she wrestled almost single-handed against the en- 
ergy of the French Revolution, as well as against the colossal force 
of Napoleonic tyranny, and came out of the one struggle uncon- 
quered and out of the other a conqueror. Never had England 
stood higher among the nations of the Old "World than after Wa- 
terloo ; but she was already conscious that her real greatness lay 
not in the Old World but in the New. From the moment of the 
Declaration of Independence it mattered little whether England 
counted for less or more with the nations around her. She was 
no longer a mere European power, no longer a mere rival of Ger- 
many or Russia or France. She was from that hour a mother of 
nations. In America she had begotten a great people, and her 
emigrant ships were still to carry on the movement of the Teu- 
tonic race from which she herself had sprung. Her work was to 
be colonization. Her settlers were to dispute Africa with the 
Kaffir and the Hottentot, to wrest New Zealand from the Maori, 
to sow on the shores of Australia the seeds of great nations. And 
to these nations she was to give not only her blood and her speech, 
but the freedom which she had won. It is the thought of this 
which flings its grandeur around the pettiest details of our story 
in the past. The history of France has little result beyond France 
itself. German or Italian history has no direct issue outside the 
bounds of Germany or Italy. But England is only a small part 
of the outcome of English history. Its greater issues lie not with- 
in the narrow limits of the mother island, but in the destinies of 
nations yet to be. The struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of 
her statesmen, the steady love of liberty and law in her people at 
large, were shaping in the past of our little island the future of 
mankind. 

At the time, however, when this Avork first became visible in 
the severance of America, the wisdom of English statesmen seem- 
ed at its lowest ebb. The fall of Lord North in March, 1782, re- 
called the Whigs to office ; and though the Tories had now grown 
to a compact body of a hundred and fifty members, the Whigs 
still remained superior to their rivals in numbers and ability as in 
distinctness of political aim. The return, too, of the Bedford sec- 
tion of their party, as well as its steady opposition to the Amer- 
ican War, had restored much of its early cohesion. But the return 



750 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[CnAP. 



of this aristocratic and factious section only widened the breach 
which was slowly opening, on questions such as that of Parlia- 
mentary reform, between the bulk of the Whig party and the 
small fragment which remained true to the more popular sym- 
pathies of Lord Chatham. Lord Shelburne was owned as the 
head of the Chatham part}'', and it was reinforced at this moment 
by the entry into Parliament of the second son of its earliest lead- 
er. William Pitt had hardly reached his twenty-second year; but 
he left college with the learning of a ripe scholar, and his ready . 
and sonorous eloquence had been matured by the teaching of 
Chatham. " He will be one of the first men in Parliament," said 
a member to the Whig leader, Charles Fox, after Pitt's first sj)eech 
in the House of Commons. " He is so already," replied Fox. His 
figure, tall and spare, but without grace, showed even now in every 
movement the pride which Avas written on the hard lines of a coun- 
tenance never lighted by a smile — a pride which broke out in his 
cold and repulsive address, his invariable gravity of demeanor, 
and his habitual air of command. How great the qualities were 
which lay beneath this haughty exterior no one knew; nor had 
any one guessed how soon this "boy," as his rivals mockingly 
styled him, was to crush every opponent and to hold England at 
his wilK* There was only a smile of wonder when he refused any 
of the minor offices which were offered him in the new Whig ad- 
ministration, which in spite of the King's reluctance Avas formed 
on the fall of Lord North under the Marquis of Rockingham. 

On Rockingham fell the duty of putting an end at any cost to 
the war. Ireland was satisfied by the repeal of the Act of George 
the First which declared the right of the Parliament of Great 
Britain to legislate for the L-ish people ; and negotiations were 
begun with America and its allies. But more important even than 
the work of peace was that of putting an end to those abuses in 
the composition of Parliament by which George the Third had 
been enabled to plunge the country into war. A thorough reform 
of the House of Commons was the only effectual means of doing 
this, and Pitt brought forward a bill founded on his father's plans 
for that purpose. But the Whigs could not resolve on the sacri- 
fice of property and influence which such a reform would involve. 
Pitt's bill was thrown out; and in its stead the Ministry endeav- 
ored to weaken the means of corrupt influence which the King had 
so unscrupulously used by disqualifying persons holding govern- 
ment contracts from sitting in Parliament, by depriving revenue 
officers of the elective franchise (a measure which diminished the 
inffuence of the Crown in seventy boroughs), and above all by .a 
bill for the reduction of the civil establishment, of the pension list, 
and of the secret-service fund, which was inti'oduced by Burke. 
These measures were to a great extent effectual in diminishing the 
influence of the Crown over Parliament, and they are memorable 
as marking the date when the direct bribery of members absolute- 
ly ceased. They were absolutely inoperative in rendering the 
House of Commons really representative of or responsible to the 
people of England. But the jealousy which the mass of theWhiga 



X] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



751 



entertained for the Chathani section and its plans was move plain- 
ly shown on the death of Lord Rockingham in July. Slielburne 
was no sooner called to the head of the Ministry than Fox with 
his immediate followers resigned. Pitt on the other hand accept- 
ed office as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

The Shelburne Ministry only lasted long enough to conclude 
the Peace of Paris; for in the opening of 1783 it was overthrown 
by the most unscrupulous coalition knoMai in our history — that of 
the Whig followers of Fox with the Tories who still clung to Lord 
iNTorth. Secure in their Parliamentary majority, and heedless of 
the power of public opinion without the walls of the House of 
Commons, the new Ministers entered boldly on a greater task than 
had as yet taxed the constructive genius of English statesmen. 
To leave such a dominion as Warren Hastings had built up in In- 
dia to the control of a mere company of traders was clearly im- 
possible ; and Fox proposed to transfer the political government 
from the Directors of the Company to a board of seven Commis- 
sioners. The appointment of the seven was vested in the first in- 
stance in Parliament, and afterward in the Crown; their office 
was to be held for five years, but they Avere removable on address 
from either House of Parliament. The proposal was at once met 
with a storm of opposition. The scheme was an injudiciofls one; 
for the new Commissioners would have been destitute of that prac- 
tical knowledge of India which belonged to the Company, while 
the want of any immediate link between them and the actual Min- 
istry of the Crown would have prevented Parliament from exer- 
cising a real control over their acts. But these objections to the 
India Bill were hardly heard in the popular outcry against it. The 
merchant class was galled by the blow leveled at the greatest mer- 
chant body in the realm ; corporations ti'embled at the canceling 
of a charter; the King viewed the measure as a mere means of 
transferring the patronage of India to the Whigs. With the na- 
tion at large the real fault of the bill lay in the character of the 
Ministry which proposed it. The Whigs had a second time re- 
jected Pitt's proposal of Parliamentary reform ; but their coali- 
tion with IsTorth showed that in an unreformed Parliament the 
force of public opinion was unable to check the most shameless 
efforts of political faction. The power of the Crown had been 
diminished by the reforms of Lord Rockingham to the profit, not 
of the people, but of the borough-mongers who usurped its repre- 
sentation. To give the rule and patronage of India over to the 
existing House of Commons was to give a new and immense pow- 
er to a body which misused in the grossest way the power it pos- 
sessed. It was the sense of this popular feeling which encouraged 
the King to exert his personal influence to defeat the measure in 
the Lords, and on its defeat to order his Ministers to deliver up 
the seals. In December, 1783, Pitt accepted the post of First Lord 
of the Treasury ; but his position would at once have been unten- 
able had the country gone Avith its nominal representatives. ■ He 
was defeated again and again by large majorities in the Commons; 
but the majorities dwindled as a shower of addresses from every 

48 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



quarter, from the Tory University of Oxford as from the Whig 
Corporation of London, proved that public opinion went with the 
Minister and not with the House. It was the general sense of this 
which justified Pitt in the firmness with which, in the teeth of ad- 
dresses for his removal from ofiice, he delayed the dissolution of 
Parliament for five months, and gained time for that ripening of 
opinion on which he counted for success. When the elections of 
1784 came the struggle was at once at an end. The public feel- 
ing had become strong enough for the moment to break through 
the corrupt influences \.'hich generally made representation a farce. 
Every great constituency returned supporters to Pitt; of the ma- 
jority which had defeated him in the Commons a hundred and 
sixty members were unseated ; and only a fragment of the Whig 
party was saved by its command of nomination boroughs, 

India owes to Pitt's triumph a form of government which re- 
mained unchanged to our own day. The India Bill which he in- 
troduced in 1784 preserved in appearance the political and com- 
mercial powers of the Directors, while establishing a Board of 
Control, formed from members of the Privy Council, for the ap- 
proval or annulling of their acts. Practically, however, the powers 
of the Board of Directors were absorbed by a secret committee 
of three elected members of that body, to whom all the more im- 
portant administrative functions had been reserved by the bill, 
while those of the Board of Control were virtually exercised by 
its President. As the President was in efiect a new Secretary of 
State for the Indian Department, and became an important mem- 
ber of each Ministry, responsible like his fellow-members for his 
action to Parliament, the administration of India was thus made 
a part of the general system of the English government ; while 
Vae secret committee supplied the practical experience of Indian 
afiairs in Avhich the Minister might be deficient. But a far more 
important change than any which could be wrought by legislative 
measures took place at this time in the attitude of England itself 
toward its great dependency. The discussions over the rival India 
Bills created a sense of national responsibility for its good govern- 
ment. There was a general resolve that the security against in- 
justice and misrule which was enjoyed by the poorest Englishman 
should be enjoyed by the poorest Hindoo; and this resolve ex- 
pressed itself in 1 786 in the trial of Warren Hastings. Hastings 
returned from India at the close of the war with the hope of re- 
wards as great as those of Clive. He had saved all that Clive had 
gained. He had laid the foundation of a vast empire in the East. 
He had shown rare powers of administration, and the foresight, 
courage, and temperance which mark the real rulers of men. But 
the wisdom and glory of his rule could not hide its terrible ruth- 
lessness. To glut the ceaseless demands of the Company at home, 
to support his wars, to feed his diplomacy, he had needed money ; 
and he took it wherever he could find it. He sold for a vast sum 
the services of British troops to crush the free tribes of the Rohil- 
las. He wrung half a million by oppression from the Rajah of 
Benares. He extorted by torture and starvation more than a mill- 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



753 



ion from the Princesses of Oude. N"or was this all. He had re- 
tained his hold upon power by measures hardly less unscrupulous. 
At the opening of his career, when he was looked upon as helpless 
before his enemies in the Council, he had shown his power by using 
the forms of English law to bring Nuncomar, a native who chose 
the party opposed to him, to death as a forger. When Sir Elijah 
Impey, the first Chief-Justice of Bengal, stood in the way of his 
plans, he bribed him into acquiescence by creating a fictitious and 
well-paid ofiice in his favor. It was true that the hands of the 
Governor-General were clean, and that he had sought for power 
from no selfish motive, but from a well-grounded conviction that 
his possession of power was necessary for the preservation of India 
to the British Crown. But even Pitt shrank from justifying his 
acts when Burke, in words of passionate eloquence, moved his im- 
peachment. The great trial lingered on for years, and in the long 
run Hastings secured an acquittal. But the end at which the 
impeachment aimed had really been won. The crimes which sul- 
lied the glory of Hastings have never been repeated by the worst 
of his successors. From that day to this the peasant of Bengal or 
of Mysore has enjoyed the same rights of justice and good govern- 
ment as are claimed by Englishmen. 

The refusal, in spite of pressure from the King, to shelter Has- 
tings when he had once convinced himself that Hastings was un- 
just, marked the character of William Pitt. At the moment when 
the new Parliament came together after the overthrow of the Coa- 
lition, the Minister of twenty-five seemed master of England as no 
Minister had been before. Even the King yielded to his sway, 
partly through gratitude for the triumph he had won for him over 
the Whigs, partly from a sense of the madness which was soon to 
strike him down. The Whigs were broken, unpopular, and' with- 
out a policy. The Tories clung to the Minister who had " saved 
the King." All that the trading classes had loved in Chatham — 
his nobleness of temper, his consciousness of power, his patriotism, 
his sympathy with a wider world than the world within the Par- 
liament House — they saw in William Pitt. He had little indeed of 
the poetic and imaginative side of Chatham's genius, of his quick 
perception of what was just and what was possible, his far-reach- 
ing conceptions of national policy, his outlook into the future"^ of 
the world. Pitt's flowing and sonorous commonplaces rang hollow 
beside the broken phrases which still make his father's eloquence 
a living thing to Englishmen. On the other hand he possessed 
some qualities in which Chatham was utterly wanting. His tem- 
per, though naturally ardent and sensitive, had been schooled in 
a proud self-command. His simplicity and good taste freed him 
from his father's ostentation and extravagance. Difl"use and com- 
monplace as his speeches seem, they were adapted as much by their 
very qualities of diflfuseness and commonplace, as by their lucidity 
and good-sense, to the intelligence of the middle classes whom Pitt 
felt to be his real audience. In his love of peace, his immense 
industry, his dispatch of business, his skill in debate, his knowledge 
of finance, he recalled Sir Robert Walpole ; but he had virtues 



754 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



which Walpole never possessefl, and he was free from Walpole's 
worst defects. He was careless of personal gain. He was too 
proud to rule by corruption. His lofty self-esteem left no room 
for any jealousy of subordinates. He was generous in his appreci- 
ation of youthful merits ; and the " boys " he gathered around him, 
such as Canning and Lord Wellesley, rewarded his generosity by 
a devotion which death left untouched. With Walpole's cynical 
inaction Pitt had no sympathy whatever. His policy from the 
first was one of active reform, and he faced every one of the prob- 
lems — financial, constitutional, religious — from which Walpole had 
shrunk. Above all, he had none of Walpole's scorn of his fellow- 
men. The noblest feature in his mind was its wide humanity. 
His love for England was as deep and personal as his father's love, 
but of the sympathy with English passion and English prejudice 
which had been at once his father's weakness and strength he had 
not a trace. When Fox taunted him with forgetting Chatham's 
jealousy of France, and his faith that she was the natural foe of 
England, Pitt answered nobly that " to suppose any nation can be 
unalterably the enemy of another is weak and childish," Tiie 
temper of the time and the larger sympathy of man with man, 
which especially marks the eighteenth century as a turning-point 
in the history of the human race, was every Avhere bringing to the 
front a new order of statesmen, such as Turgot and Joseph the 
Second, whose characteristics were a love of mankind, and a belief 
that as the happiness of the individual can only be secured by the 
general happiness of tlie community to which he belongs, so the 
welfare of individual nations can only be secured by the general 
welfare of the world. Of these Pitt was one. But he rose high 
above the rest in the consummate knowledge and the practical 
force which he brought to the realization of his aims, 

Pitt's strength lay in finance ; and he came forward at a time 
when the growth of English wealth made a knowledge of finance 
essential to a great Minister. The jDrogress of the nation itself 
was wonderful. Population more than doubled during the eight- 
eenth century, and the advance of wealth was even greater than 
that of population. The war had added a hundred millions to the 
national debt, but the burden was hardly felt. The loss of Amer- 
ica only increased the commerce with that country. Industry be- 
gan that great career which was to make England the workshop 
of the world. During the first half of the century the cotton trade, 
of which Manchester Avas the principal seat, had only risen from 
the value of twenty to that of forty thousand pounds; and the 
hand-loom retained the primitive shape which is still found in the 
hand-looms of India. But three successive inventions in ten years 
— that of the spinning-machine in 1768 by the barber Arkwright, of 
the spinning-jenny in 1764 by the weaver Hargreaves, of the mule 
by the weaver Crompton in 1776 — turned Lancashire into a hive 
of industry. At the accession of George the Third the whole linen 
trade of Scotland was of less value than the cloth trade of York- 
shire, Before the close of his reign Glasgow was fast rising into 
one of the trading capitals of the world. The potteries which 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



(55 



Wedgwood established in 1763, and in which he availed himself 
of the genius of Flaxnian,soon eclipsed those of Holland or France, 
Before twenty years had passed more than twenty thousand pot- 
ters were employed in Staffordshire alone. This rapid growth of 
manufactures brought about a corresponding improvement in the 
means of communication throughout the country. Up to this time 
these had been of the rudest sort. The roads were for the most 
part so wretched that all cheap or rapid transit was impossible ; 
and the cotton bales of Manchester were carried to Liverpool or 
Bristol on pack-horses. One of the great Avorks of this period was 
the covering of England with a vast network of splendid highways. 
But roads alone could not meet the demands of the new commerce. 
The engineering genius of Brindley joined Manchester with its port 
of Liverpool in 1761 by a canal which crossed the L-well on a lofty 
aqueduct ; and the success of the experiment soon led to the uni- 
versal introduction of water-carriage. Canals linked the Trent with 
the Mersey, the Thames with the Trent, the Forth with the Clyde. 
The cheapness of the new mode of transit, as well as the great ad- 
vance in engineering science, brought about a development of En- 
glish collieries, which soon gave coal a great place among our ex- 
ports. Its value as a means of producing mechanical force was 
revealed in the discovery by which Watt in 1765 transformed the 
steam-engine from a mere toy into the most wonderful instrument 
which human industry has ever had at its command. The same 
energy was seen in the agricultural change which passed gradually 
over the country. Between the first and the last years of the eight- 
eenth century a fourth part of England was reclaimed from waste 
and brought under tillage. At the Revolution of 1688 more than 
half the kingdom was believed to consist of moorland and forest 
and fen ; and vast commons and wastes covered the greater part 
of England north of the Humber, But the numerous inclosure 
bills w^hich began with the reign of George the Second, and espe- 
cially marked that of his successor, changed the w'hole face of the 
country. Ten thousand square miles of untilled land have been 
added under their operation to the area of cultivation ; while in 
the tilled land itself the production had been more than doubled 
by the advance of agriculture which began with the travels and 
treatises of Arthur Young, the introduction of the system of large 
farms by Mr. Coke, of Norfolk, and the development of scientific 
tillage in the valleys of Lothian. 

If books are to be measured by the effect which they have pro- 
duced on the fortunes of mankind, the " Wealth of Nations " must 
rank among the greatest of books. Its author Avas Adam Smith, 
an Oxford scholar and a professor at Glasgow. Labor, he con- 
tended, was the one source of wealth, and it was by freedom of 
labor, by suffering the worker to pursue his own interest in his 
own way, that the public wealth would best be promoted. Any 
attempt to force labor into artificial channels, to shape by laws 
the course of commerce, to j^romote special branches of industry 
in particular countries, or to fix the character of the intercourse 
between one country and another, is not only a wrong to the 



JoQ 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



worker or the merchant, but actually hurtful to the wealth of a 
State. The book was published in 1776, in the opening of the 
American War, and studied by Pitt during his career as an under- 
graduate at Cambridge, From that time he owned Adam Smith 
for his master. He had hardly become Minister before he took 
the principles of the " Wealth of ISTations " as the groundwork of 
his policy. The ten earlier years of his rule marked a new point 
of departure in English statesmanship. Pitt was the first English 
Minister who really grasped the j)art which industry was to play 
in promoting the welfare of the world. He was not only a Peace 
Minister and a financier, as Walpole had been, but a statesman 
who saw that the best security for peace lay in the freedom and 
widening of commercial intercourse between nations ; that public 
economy not only lessened the general burdens, but left additional 
capital in the hands of industry ; and that finance might be turned 
from a mere means of raising revenue into a powerful engine of 
political and social improvement. 

That little was done by Pitt himself to carry these principles 
into effect was partly owing to the mass of ignorance and jjreju- 
dice with which he had to contend, and still more to the sudden 
break of his plans through the French Revolution. His power 
rested above all on the trading classes, and these were still per- 
suaded that wealth meant gold and silver, and that commerce was 
best furthered by jealous monopolies. It was only by patience 
and dexterity that the mob of merchants and country squires who 
backed him in the House of Commons could be brought to acqui- 
esce in the changes he proposed. How small his power was when 
it struggled with the prejudices around him was seen in the fail- 
ure of the first great measure he brought forward. The question 
of Parliamentary reform had been mooted, as we have seen, during 
the American War. Chatham had advocated an increase of county 
members, who were then the most independent part of the Lower 
House. The Duke of Richmond talked of universal suffrage, equal 
electoral districts, and annual Parliaments. Wilkes anticipated 
the Reform Bill of a later time by proposing to disfranchise the 
rotten boroughs, and to give members in their stead to the counties 
and to the more popular and wealthy towns. William Pitt had 
made the question his own by bringing forward a motion for re- 
form on his first entry into the House, and one of his first meas- 
ures as Minister was to bring in a bill in 1785 which, while pro- 
viding for the gradual extinction of all decayed boroughs, dis- 
franchised thirty-six at once, and transferred their members to 
counties. He brought the King to abstain from opi^osition, and 
strove to buy off the borough-mongers, as the holders of rotten 
boroughs were called, by offering to compensate them for the seats 
they lost at their market value. But the bulk of his own party 
joined the bulk of the Whigs in a steady resistance to the bill. 
The more glaring abuses, indeed, within Parliament itself — the 
abuses which stirred Chatham and Wilkes to action — had in great 
part disappeared. The bribery of members had ceased. Burke's 
Bill of Economical Reform had dealt a fatal blow at the influence 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



757 



which the King exercised by suppressing a host of useless offices, 
household appointments, judicial and diplomatic charges, which 
were maintained for the purpose of corruption. Above all, the 
recent triumph of public opinion had done much to diminish the 
sense of any real danger from the opposition Avhich Parliament 
had shown till now to the voice of the nation. " Terribly disap- 
pointed and beat," as Wilberforce tells us Pitt was by the rejec- 
tion of his measure, the temper of the House and of the people 
was too plain to be mistaken, and, though his opinion remained 
unaltered, he never brought it forward again. 

The failure of his constitutional reform was more than compen- 
sated by the triumphs of his finance. When he entered office pub- 
lic credit was at its lowest ebb. The debt had been doubled by 
the American War, yet large sums still remained unfunded, while 
the revenue was reduced by a vast system of smuggling which 
turned every coast-town into a nest of robbers. The deficiency 
was met for the moment by new taxes, but the time wMch was 
thus gained served to change the whole face of public affairs. The 
first of Pitt's financial measures — his revival of the plan for grad- 
ually paying off the debt by a sinking fund, which Walpole had 
thrown aside — was undoubtedly an error; but it had a happy ef- 
fect in restoring public confidence. He met the smuggler by a 
reduction of custom-duties which made his trade unprofitable. He 
revived Walpole's plan of an Excise. Meanwhile the public ex- 
penses were reduced, and commission after- commission was ap- 
pointed to introduce economy into every department of the pub- 
lic service. The rapid development of the national industry which 
we have already noted no doubt aided the success of these meas- 
ures. Credit was restored. The smuggling trade was greatly 
reduced. In two years there was a surplus of a million ; and, 
though duty after duty was removed, the revenue rose steadily 
with every remission of taxation. Meanwhile Pitt was showing 
the political value of the new finance. France was looked upon 
as England's natural enemy. Ireland, then as now, was England's 
difficulty. The tyrannous misgovernment under which she had 
groaned ever since the battle of the Boyne was producing its nat- 
ural fruit ; the miserable land was torn with political faction, re- 
ligious feuds, and peasant conspiracies; and so threatening had 
the attitude of the Protestant party which ruled it become during 
the American War that they had forced the English Parliament to 
relinquish its control over tlieir Parliament in Dublin. Pitt saw 
that much at least of the misery and disloyalty of Ireland sprang 
from its poverty. The population had grown rapidly, while cult- 
ure remained stationary and commerce perished. And of this 
poverty much was the direct result of unjust law. Ireland was a 
grazing country, but to protect the interests of English graziers 
the import of its cattle into England was forbidden. To protect 
the interests of English clothiers and weavers, its manufactures 
were loaded with duties. To redress this wrong was the first 
financial effort of Pitt, and the bill which he introduced in 1785 did 
away with every obstacle to freedom of trade between England 



75S 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



and Ireland. It was a measure which, as he held, would " draw 
what remained of the shattered empire together," and repair iu 
part the loss of America by creating a loyal and prosperous Ire- 
land; and though he struggled almost alone in face of a fierce op- 
position from the Whigs and the Manchester merchants, he drao-- 
ged it through the English Parliament only to see it flung aside 
by the Protestant faction under Grattan which then ruled the 
Parliament of Ireland. But the defeat only spurred him to a 
greater effort elsewhere; and his treaty of commerce with France 
in 1787 enabled the subjects of both countries to reside and travel 
in either without license or passport, did away with all prohibi- 
tion of trade on either side, and reduced every import dut)''. But 
the spirit of humanity which breathed through these measures of 
commercial freedom soon took a larger scope. The trial of War- 
ren Hastings was rousing England to a more vivid sympathy with 
the Hindoo; and in the year which followed the adoption of free 
trade with France the new philanthropy allied itself with the re- 
ligious spirit created by the Wesleys in an attack on the slave- 
trade. At the Peace of Utrecht the privilege of carrying negroes 
from the coast of Africa to sell them as laborers in the American 
colonies and the West Indian islands had been counted among the 
gains which England reaped from the war with Lewis ; but the 
horrors and iniquity of the trade, the ruin and degradation of the 
native tribes which it brought about, and above all the oppression 
of the negro himself, were now felt widely and deeply. " After a 
conversation in the open air at the root of an old tree at Holwood, 
just above the steep descent into the vale of Keston," Pitt en- 
couraged his friend, William Wilberforce, whose position as the^ 
Parliamentary representative of the Evangelical party gave weight 
to his advocacy of such a cause, to bring in a bill for the abolition 
of the slave-trade. In spite of Pitt's ardent support, the bill of 
1788 fell before the opposition of the Liverpool slave-merchants 
and the general indifference of the House. But the great move- 
ment of which it formed a part was now passing on the other side 
of the Channel into a revolution which was to change the fiice of 
the world. 

The Puritan resistance of the seventeenth century had in the 
end succeeded in checking, so far as England was concerned, the 
general tendency of the time to religious and political despotism. 
Since the Revolution of 1688 freedom of conscience and the peo- 
ple's right to govern itself through its representatives in^Parlia- 
raent had been practically established. Social equality had begun 
long before. Every man from the highest to the. lowest was sub- 
ject to and protected by the same law. The English aristocracy, 
though exercising a powerful influence on government, were pos- 
sessed of few social privileges, and prevented from forming a sep- 
arate class in the nation by the legal and social tradition which 
counted all save the eldest son of a noble house as commoners. 
No impassable line parted the gentry from the commercial classes, 
and these again possessed no privileges which could part them 
from the lower classes of the community. After a short struggle, 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



^59 



public opinion, the general sense of educated Eng-lishmen, had es- 
tablished itself as the dominant element in English government. 
But in all the other great states of Europe the wars of religion 
had left only the name of freedom. Government tended to a 
pure despotism. Privilege was supreme in religion, in politics, in 
society. Society itself rested on a rigid division of classes from 
one another, which refused to the people at large any equal rights 
of justice or of industry. We have already seen how alien such 
a conception of national life was from the ideas which the wide 
diffusion of intelligence during the eighteenth century was spread- 
ing throughout Europe; and in almost every country some en- 
lightened rulers endeavored by administrative reforms in some 
sort to satisfy the sense of Avrong which was felt around them. 
The attempts of sovereigns like Frederick the Great in Prussia 
and Joseph the Second in Austria and the Netherlands were ri- 
valed by the efforts of statesmen such as Turgot in France. It 
was in France, indeed, that the contrast between the actual state 
of society and the new ideas of public right was felt most keenly. 
Nowhere had the victory of the Crown been more complete. The 
aristocracy had been robbed of all share in public affairs ; it en- 
joyed social privileges and exemption from any contribution to 
the public burdens, without that sense of public duty which a gov- 
erning class to some degree always possesses. Guilds and monop- 
olies at once fettered the industry of the trader and the merchant, 
and cut them off from the working classes, as the value attached 
to noble blood cut both off from the aristocracy. 

If its political position, indeed, were compared with that of most 
of the countries around it, France stood high. Its government was 
less oppressive and more influenced by public opinion, its general 
wealth was larger and more evenly diffused, there was a better ad- 
ministration of justice, and greater security for public order. Poor 
as its peasantry seemed to English eyes, they were far above the 
peasants of Germany or Spain. Its middle class was the quickest 
and most intelligent in Europe. Opinion under Lewis the Fifteenth 
was practically free, though powerless to influence the government 
of the country ; and a literary class had sprung up which devoted 
itself with wonderful brilliancy and activity to popularizing the 
ideas of social and political justice which it learned from English 
writers, and in the case of Montesquieu and Voltaire from personal 
contact with English life. The moral conceptions of the time — its 
love of mankind, its sense of human brotherhood, its hatred of op- 
pression, its pity for the guilty and the poor, its longing after a 
higher and nobler standard of life and action — were expressed by a 
crowd of writers, and above all by Rousseau, with a fire and elo- 
quence which carried them to the heart of the people. Every 
where the new force of intelligence jostled roughly with the social 
forms Avith which it found itself in contact. The philosopher de- 
nounced the tyranny of the priesthood. The peasant grumbled at 
the lord's right to judge him in his courts, and to exact feudal serv- 
ices from him. The merchant was galled by the trading restric- 
tions and the heavy taxation. The country gentry rebelled against 



JQO 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



tlieir exclusion from public life and from the government of the 
country. Its powerlessness to bring about any change at home 
turned all the new energy into sympathy with a struggle against 
tyranny abroad. Public opinion forced France to ally itself with 
America in its contest for liberty, and French volunteers under 
the Marquis de Lafayette joined Washington's army. But while 
the war spread more wildly throughout the nation the craving for 
freedom, it brought on the government financial embarrassment 
from which it could only free itself by an appeal to the country 
at large. Lewis the Sixteenth resolved to summon the States- 
General, which had not met .since the time of Richelieu, and to 
appeal to the nobles to waive their immunity from taxation. His 
resolve at once stirred into vigorous life every impulse and desire 
which had been seething in the minds of the people ; and the 
States-General no sooner met at Versailles in May, 1789, than the 
fabric of despotism and privilege began to crumble. A rising in 
Paris destroyed the Bastile, and the capture of this fortress was 
taken for the sign of a new era of constitutional freedom for France 
and for Europe. Every where men thrilled with a strange joy at 
the tidings of its fall. " How much is this the greatest event that 
ever happened in the w^orldj'Tox cried with a burst of enthusiasm, 
" and how much the best !" 

Pitt regarded the approach of France to sentiments of liberty 
which had long been familiar to England Avith characteristic cool- 
ness, but with no disti'ust. For the moment, indeed, his attention 
was distracted by an attack of madness which visited the King in 
1788, and by the claim of a right to the Regency which was at 
once advanced by the Prince of Wales. The Prince belonged to 
the Whig j)arty ; and Fox, who was traveling in Italy, hurried 
home to support his claim, in full belief that the Prince's Regency 
would be followed by his own return to power. Pitt successfully 
resisted it on the constitutional ground that in such a case the 
right to choose a temporary regent, under what limitations it 
would, lay with Parliament; and a bill which conferred the Re- 
gency on the Prince, in accordance with this view, was already 
passing the Houses when the recovery of the King put an end to 
the long dispute. Abroad, too, Pitt's difficulties were increasing. 
Russia had risen into greatness under Catharine the Second ; and 
Catharine had resolved from the first on the annexation of Poland, 
the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, and the setting up of a 
Russian throne at Constantinople. In her first aim she was baffled 
for the moment by Frederick the Great. She had already made 
herself virtually mistress of the whole of Poland, her armies oc- 
cupied the kingdom, and she had seated a nominee of her own on 
its throne, when Frederick, in union w^ith the Emperor Joseph the 
Second, forced her to admit Germany to a share of the spoil. If 
the first Polish partition of 1773 brought the Russian frontier 
westward to the upper waters of the Dwina and the Dnieper, it 
gave Galicia to Maria Theresa, and West Prussia to Frederick 
himself. Foiled in her first aim, she waited for the realization of 
her second till. the alliance between the two German powers was 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



761 



at an end through the resistance of Prussia to Joseph's schemes 
for the annexation of Bavaria, and the death of Frederick removed 
her most watchful foe. Then, in 1788, Joseph and the Empress 
joined hands for a partition of the Turkish Empire. But Prussia 
was still Avatchful, and England was no longer fettered as in 1773 
by troubles with America. The friendship established by Chat- 
ham between the two countries, which had been suspended by 
Bute's treachery, and all but destroyed during the Northern League 
of Neutral Powers, had been restored by Pitt through his co-oper- 
ation with Frederick's successor in the restoration of the Dutch 
Stadtholderate. Its political weight was now seen in the alliance 
of England, Prussia, and Holland in 1789 for the preservation of 
the Turkish Empire. A great European struggle seemed at hand ; 
and in such a struggle the sympathy and aid of France was of 
the highest importance. But with the treaty the danger passed 
away. In the spring of 1790 Joseph died broken-hearted at the 
failure of his plans and the revolt of the ISTetherlands against his 
innovations ; and Austria practically withdrew from the war with 
the Turks. 

Meanwhile in France things moved fast. By breaking down 
the division between its separate orders the States-Genesal be- 
came a National Assembly, and abolished the privileges of the 
provincial Parliaments, of the nobles, and the Chui'ch. In October 
the mob of Paris marched on Versailles, and forced both King and 
Assembly to return with them to the capital; and a Constitution, 
hastily put together, was accepted by Lewis the Sixteenth in the 
stead of his old despotic power. To Pitt, the tumult and disorder 
with which these great changes were wrought seemed transient 
matters. In January, 1790, he still believed that "the iDresent 
convulsions in France must sooner or later culminate in general 
harmony and regular order," and that when her own freedom was 
established, "France would stand forth as one of the most brilliant 
powers of Europe," But the coolness and good-will with which 
Pitt looked on the Revolution was far from being universal in the 
nation at large. The cautious good-sense of the bulk of English- 
men, their love of order and law, their distaste for violent changes 
and for abstract theories, as well as their reverence for the past, 
were fast rousing throughout the country a dislike of the revolu- 
tionar)^ changes which were hurrying on across the Channel, That 
the dislike passed slowly into fear and hatred was due above all to 
the impassioned eflbrts of Edmund Burke, Forty years before, 
Burke liad come to London as a poor and unknown Irish advent- 
urer. The learning which made him at once the friend of John- 
son and Reynolds, and the imaginative jDOwer which enabled him 
to give his learning a living shape, promised him a philosophical 
and literary career; but instinct drew Burke to politics; he be- 
cama secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered Parlia- 
ment under his patronage. His speeches on the Stamp Acts and 
the American War soon lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker- 
like figure, the little wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll 
of paper wliich loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a 



162 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



great orator and less of the characteristics of his oratory — its pas- 
sionate ardor, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources ; 
the dazzling succession in which irony, pathos, invective, tender- 
ness, the most brilliant word-pictures, the coolest argument fol- 
lowed each other. It was an eloquence indeed of a wholly new 
order in English experience. Walpole's clearness of statement, 
Chatham's appeals to emotion, were exchanged for the impassioned 
expression of a distinct philosophy of politics. " I have learned 
more from him tlian from all the books I ever read," Fox exclaim- 
ed with a burst of generous admiration. The philosophical cast 
of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical 
coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork, indeed, of his nature 
was poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and 
color from the splendor and fire of his imagination. A nation was 
to him a great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose 
institutions were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, 
that to touch it rudely was a sacrilege. Its constitution was no 
artificial scheme of government, but an exquisite balance of social 
forces which was in itself a natural outcome of its history and de- 
velopment. In the Revolution of 1688 Burke saw the fated close 
of a great era of national progress which had moved on ^' from 
precedent to precedent." His temper was in this way conserva- 
tive, but his conservatism sprang not from a love of inaction, but 
from a sense of the value of social order, and from an imaginative 
reverence for all that existed. Every institution was hallowed to 
him by the clear insight with which he discerned its relations to 
the past, and its subtle connection with the social fabric around it. 
To touch even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be risking the ruin 
of a complex structure of national order which it had cost centuries 
to build up. " The equilibrium of the Constitution," he said, " has 
something so delicate about it, that the least displacement may 
destroy it." " It is a difficult and dangerous matter even to touch 
so complicated a machine." Perhaps the readiest refutation of 
such a theory was to be found in its influence on Burke's practical 
dealing with politics. It left him hostile to all movement Avhat- 
ever. He gave his passionate adhesion to the helpless inaction of 
the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an honest 
man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check the 
corruption of Parliament by his bill for civil retrenchment, but he 
took the lead in defeating all plans for its reform. Though he was 
the one man in England Avho understood with Pitt the value of 
free industry, he struggled bitterly against the young Minister's 
proposals to give freedom to Irish trade, and against his commer- 
cial treaty with France. His work seemed to be that of investing 
with a gorgeous poetry the policy of timid content which the 
Whigs had inherited from Sir Robert Walpole. The very intensi- 
ty of his belief in the natural development of a nation seemed to 
render him incapable of understanding that any good could come 
from particular laws or special reforms. 

It was easy to see in what Avay a temper such as this Avould be 
stirred by the changes which were now going on in France. The 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



V63 



fall of the Bastile, which kindled enthusiasm in Fox, filled BiHrke 
with distrust. " Whenevei* a separation is made between liberty 
and justice," he wrote a few weeks later, " neither is safe." The 
night of the fourth of August, when the privileges of every class 
were abolished, filled him witli horror. He saw, and rightly saw, 
in it the critical moment which revealed the character of the Rev- 
olution, and his part was taken at once. "The French," he cried 
in January, while Pitt was foretelling a glorious future for the new 
Constitution — " the French have shown themselves the ablest arch- 
itects of ruin who have hitherto existed in the world. In a short 
space of time they have pulled to the ground their army, their 
navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufactures." But 
in Parliament he stood alone. The Whigs, though distrustfully, 
followed Fox in his applause of the Revolution. The Tories, yet 
more distrustfully, followed Pitt ; and Pitt warmly expressed his 
sympathy with the Constitutional Government which was ruling- 
France. At this moment, indeed, the Revolutionary party gave a 
signal proof of its friendship for England. Irritated by an En- 
glish settlement at Nootka Sound, in California, Spain appealed to 
France for aid in accordance with the Family Compact ; and the 
French Ministry, with the Constitutional party at its back, resolved 
on a war as the best means of checking the progress of the Rev- 
olution and restoring the power of the Crown. The Revolutionary 
party naturally opposed this design ; after a bitter struggle the 
right of declaring war, save with the sanction of the Assembly, 
was taken from the King ; and all danger of hostilities passed 
away. "The French Government," Pitt asserted, " was bent on 
cultivating the most unbounded friendship for Great Britain," and 
he saw no reason in its revolutionary changes why Britain should 
not return the friendship of France. He saw that nothing but 
the joint action of France and England Avould in the end arrest 
the troubles of Eastern Europe. His intervention foiled for the 
moment a fresh effort of Prussia to rob Poland of Dantzic and 
Thorn. But though Russia was still pressing Turkey hard, a 
Russian war was so unpopular in England that a hostile vote in 
Parliament forced Pitt to discontinue his armaments; and a fresh 
union of Austria and Prussia, which promised at this juncture to 
bring about a close of the Turkish struggle, promised also a fresh 
attack on the independence of Poland. 

But while Pitt was j^leading for friendship between the two 
countries, Burke was resolved to make friendship impossible. In 
Parliament, as we have seen, he stood alone. He had long ceased, 
in fact, to have any hold over the House of Commons. The elo- 
quence which had vied with that of Chatham during the discus- 
sions on the Stamp Act had become distasteful to the bulk of its 
members. The length of liis speeches, the profound and philo- 
sophical character of his argument, the splendor and often the ex- 
travagance of his illustrations, his passionate earnestness, his want 
of temper and discretion, wearied and perplexed the squires and 
merchants about him. He was known at last as " the dinner-bell 
of the House," so rapidly did its benches thin at his rising. For 



764 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



a time his energies found scope in the impeachment of Hastings ; 
and the grandeur of his appeals to the justice of England hushed 
detraction. But with the close of the impeachment his repute had 
again fallen ; and the approach of old age — for he was now past 
sixty — seemed to counsel retirement from an assembly where he 
stood unpopular and alone. But age and clisajDpointment and 
loneliness were all forgotten as Burke saw rising across the Chan- 
nel the embodiment of all that he hated — a Revolution founded 
on scorn of the past, and threatening with ruin the whole social 
fabric which the past had reared ; the ordered structiire of classes 
and ranks crumbling before a doctrine of social equality ; a State 
rudely demolished and reconstituted ; a Church and a nobility 
swept away in a night. Against the enthusiasm of what he right- 
ly saw to be a new political religion he resolved to rouse the en- 
thusiasm of the old. He was at once a great orator and a great 
writer; and now that the House was deaf to his voice, he appealed 
to the country by his pen. The " Reflections on the French Rev- 
olution," which he published in October, 1790, not only denounced 
the acts of rashness and violence which sullied the great change 
that France had wrought, but the very jDrinciples from which the 
change had sprung. Burke's deep sense of the grandeur of social 
order, of the value of that continuity in human affairs " without 
which men Avould become like flies in a summer," blinded him to 
all but the faith in mere rebellion, and the yet sillier faith in mere 
novelty which disguised a real nobleness of aim and temper even 
in the most ardent of the Revolutionists. He would see no abuses 
in the past, now that it had fallen, or any thing but the ruin of 
society in the future. He preached a crusade against men whom 
he regarded as the foes of religion and civilization, and called on ' 
the armies of Europe to put down a Revolution whose principles 
threatened every state with destruction. 

The great obstacle to such a crusade was Pitt ; and one of the 
grandest outbursts of the " Reflections " closed with a bitter taunt 
at the Minister. " The age of chivalry," Burke cried, " is gone ; 
that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and 
the glory of Europe is extinguished forever." But neither taunts 
nor invective moved Pitt from his course. At the moment when 
the " Reflections " appeared, he gave a fresh assurance to France 
of his resolve to have nothing to do with any crusade against the 
Revolution. " This country," he wrote, " means to persevere in 
the neutrality hitherto scrupulously observed with respect to the 
internal dissensions of France ; and from which it will never de- 
part unless the conduct held there make it indi-^pensable as an 
act of self-defense." So far, indeed, was he from sharing the reac- 
tionary panic which was spreading around him, that he chose this 
time for supporting Fox in his Libel Act, a measure which, by 
transferring the decision on what was libelous in any publication 
from the judge to the jury, completed the freedom of the press ; 
and himself passed in 1791 a bill which, though little noticed 
among the storms of the time, was one of the noblest of his achieve- 
ments. He boldly put aside the dread which had been roused by 



X.J 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



V65 



the American War that the gift of self-government to our colonies 
would serve only as a step toward their secession from the moth- 
er country, and established a House of Assembly and a Council in 
the two Canadas. " I am convinced," said Fox, who gave the 
measure his hearty support, " that the only method of retaining 
distant colonies with advantage is to enable them to govern them- 
selves ;" and the policy of the one statesman as well as the fore- 
sight of the other have been justified by the later history of our 
dependencies, i^or had Burke better success with his own party. 
Fox remained an ardent lover of the Revolution, and answered a 
fresh attack of Burke upon it with more than usual warmth. A 
close affection had bound till now the two men together ; but the 
fanaticism of Burke declared it at an end. " There is no loss of 
friendship," Fox exclaimed, with a sudden burst of tears. " There 
is !" Burke rejoined. " I know the price of my conduct. Our 
friendship is at an end." Within the walls of Parliament Burke 
stood utterly alone. His "Appeal from the New to the Old 
Whigs," in June, 1791, failed to detach a follower from Fox. Pitt 
coldly counseled him rather to praise the English Constitution 
than to rail at the French. • "I have made many enemies and few 
friends," Burke wrote sadly to the French princes, who had fled 
from their country and were gathering in arms at Coblentz, " by 
the part I have taken." But the opinion of the people was slowly 
drifting to his side. A sale of thirty thousand copies showed that 
the "Reflections" echoed the general sentiment of Englishmen. 
The mood of England, indeed, at this moment was unfavorable to 
any fair appreciation of the Revolution across the Channel. Her 
temper was above all industrial. Men who were working hard 
and fast growing rich, who had the narrow and practical turn of 
men of business, looked angrily at its sudden disturbance of order, 
its restless and vague activity, its rhetorical appeals to human 
feeling, its abstract and often empty theories. In England it was 
a time of political content and social well-being, of steady eco- 
nomic progress, and of a powerful religious revival ; and the insu- 
lar want of imaginative interest in other races hindered men from 
seeing that every element of this content, of this order, of this 
peaceful and harmonious progress, of this reconciliation of society 
and religion, was wanting abroad. The general sympathy which 
the Revolution had at first attracted passed slowly into disgust 
at the violence of its legislative changes, the anarchy of the coun- 
try, the bankruptcy of its treasury, and the growing povi^er of the 
mob of Paris. Sympathy, in fact, was soon limited to a few groups 
of reformers who gathered in " Constitutional Clubs," and whose 
reckless language only furthered the national reaction. But in 
spite of Burke's appeals, and the cries of the nobles who had fled 
from France and longed only to march against their country, Eu- 
rope held back from war, and Pitt preserved his attitude of neu- 
trality, though with a greater appearance of reserve. 

So anxious, in fact, did the aspect of affairs in the East make 
Pitt for the restoration of tranquillity in France, that he foiled a 
plan which its emigrant nobles had formed for a descent on the 



S:eo. III. 



766 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



French coast, and declared formally at Vienna that England would 
remain absolutely neutral should hostilities arise between France 
and the Emperor, But the Emperor Avas as anxious to avoid a 
French war as Pitt liimself. Though Catharine, now her war with 
Turkey was over, wished to plunge the two German powers into 
a struggle with the Revolution, which would leave her free to an- 
nex Poland single-handed, neither Leopold nor Prussia would tie 
their hands by such a contest. The flight of Lewis the Sixteenth 
from Paris in June, 1791, brought Europe for a moment to the verge 
of war ; but he was intercepted and brought back ; and for a while 
the danger seemed to incline the Revolutionists in France to great- 
er moderation. Lewis, too, not only accepted the Constitution, but 
pleaded earnestly with the Emperor against any armed interven- 
tion as certain to bring ruin to his throne. In their conference at 
Pilnitz, therefore, in August, Leopold and tlie King of Prussia con- 
tented themselves with a vague declaration inviting the European 
powers to co-operate in restoring a sound form of government in 
France, availed themselves of England's neutrality to refuse all 
military aid to the French princes, and dealt simply with the af- 
fairs of Poland. But the peace they desired soon became impos- 
sible. The Constitutional Royalists in France availed themselves 
of the irritation caused by the Declaration of Pilnitz to arouse 
again the cry for a M'ar which, as they hoped, would give strength 
to the throne. The Jacobins, on the other hand, under the influ- 
ence of the " Girondists," or deputies from the south of France, 
whose aim was a republic, and who saw in a great national strug- 
gle the means of overthrowing the monarchy, decided, in spite of 
the opposition of Robespierre, on a contest with the Emperor. 
Both parties united to demand the breaking up of an army which 
the emigrant princes had formed on the Rhine ; and though Leo- 
pold assented to this demand, France declared war against his 
successor, Francis, in April, 1792. 

Misled by their belief in a revolutionary enthusiasm in En- 
gland, the French Constitutionalists had hoped for her alliance in 
this war ; but though Pitt at once refused aid, and stipulated 
that Holland must remain untouched, he j^romised neutrality even 
though Belgium should for a time be occupied by a French army. 
In the same temper he» announced in 1792 a reduction of military 
forces, and brolight forward a Peace Budget which rested on a 
large remission of taxation. But peace grew hourly more impos- 
sible. The French Revolutionists, in their eagerness to find an 
ally in their war, were striving by intrigues with the Constitution- 
al Clubs to arouse the spirit in England which they had aroused 
in France. The French embassador, Chauvelin, boldly protested 
against a proclamation which denounced this seditious correspond- 
ence. Even Fox, at such a moment, declared that the discussion 
of Parliamentary reform was inexpedient. Meanwhile Burke was 
working hard, in writings whose extravagance of style was for- 
gotten in their intensity of feeling, to sjDread alarm throughout 
Europe. He had from the first encouraged the emigrant princes 
to take arms, and sent his son to join them at Coblentz. " Be 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



767 



alarmists," he wrote to them ; " diffuse terror !" But the Royalist 
terror which he sowed had at last aroused a revolutionary terror 
in France itself. At the threat of war against the Emperor the 
two German Courts had drawn together, and, reluctantly aban- 
doning all hope of peace with France, gathered eighty thousand 
men under the Duke of Brunswick, and advanced slowly in Au- 
gust on the Meuse. France, though she had forced on the strug- 
gle, was really almost defenseless ; her army in Belgium broke at 
the iirst shock of arms into shameful rout ; and the panic, spread- 
ing from the army to the nation at large, took violent and horrible 
forms. At the first news of Brunswick's advance the mob of Paris 
broke into the Tuileries on the 10th of August; and on its demand 
Lewis, who had taken refuge in the Assembly, was suspended from 
his office and imprisoned in the Temple. From this moment the 
Revolution — if by the Revolution we mean the progress of France 
toward political, social, and religious freedom — was at an end. The 
populace of Paris, with the Commune of Paris at its head, imposed 
its will upon the Assembly and upon the nation. The only changes 
which France was for a long time to experience were changes of 
masters ; but whether the Commune or the Directory or Bonaparte 
were its despot, the government was a simple despotism. And 
despotism, as ever, began its work with bloodshed and terror. 
While General Dumouriez by boldness and adroit negotiations 
arrested the progress of the Allies in the defiles of the Argonne, 
bodies of paid murderers butchered in September the Royalist 
prisoners who crowded the jails of Paris, with a view of influenc- 
ing the elections to a new Convention which met to proclaim the 
abolition of royalty. The retreat of Brunswick's ai*my, whose num- 
bers had been reduced by disease till an advance on Paris became 
impossible, and a brilliant victory won by Dumouriez at Jemappes 
which laid the Netherlands at his feet, turned the panic of the 
French into a wild self-confidence. In November the Convention 
decreed that France offered the aid of her soldiers to all nations 
who would strive for freedom. " All governments are our ene- 
mies," said its President; "all peoples are our allies." In the 
teeth of treaties signed only two years before, and without any 
pretext for war, the French Government resolved to attack Hol- 
land, and ordered its generals to enforce by arms the opening of 
the Scheldt. 

To do this was to force England into war. Public opinion was 
pressing harder day by day upon Pitt. The horror of the massa- 
cres of September, the hideous despotism of the Parisian mob, had 
done more to estrange England from the Revolution than all the 
eloquence of Burke. But even while withdrawing our Minister 
from Paris on the imprisonment of the King, Pitt clung stubborn- 
ly to the hope of peace. He had hindered Holland from joining 
the coalition against France. His hope was to bring the warto 
an end through English mediation, and to " leave France, which 
I believe is the best way, to arrange its own internal affairs as it 
can." No hour of Pitt's life is so great as the hour when he stood 
alone in England, and refused to bow to the growing cry of the 

49 



V68 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



nation for war. Even the news of the September massacres conld 
only force from him a hoj)e that France might abstain from any 
war of conquest and escape from its social anarchy. In October 
the French agent in England reported that Pitt was about to rec- 
ognize the Republic. At the opening of November he still pressed 
on Holland a steady neutrality. It was France, and not England, 
Avhich at last wrenched from his grasp the peace to which he clung 
so desperately. The decree of the Convention and the attack on 
the Dutch left him no choice but war, for it was impossible for 
England to endure a French fleet at Antwerp, or to desert allies 
like the United Provinces, But even in December the news of the 
approaching partition of Poland nerved him to a last struggle for 
peace ; he offered to aid Austria in acquiring Bavaria if she would 
make terms with France, and pledged himself to France to abstain 
from war if that power would cease from violating the independ- 
ence of her neighbor states. But across the Channel his modera- 
tion was only taken for fear, while in England the general mourn- 
ing which followed on the news of the French King's execution 
showed the growing ardor for the inevitable contest. Both sides 
now ceased from diplomatic communications, and in February, 
1793, France issued her Declaration of War. 



Seciiou IV.— The War witli France. l^OS— 1815. 

[Authorities. — To those mentioned iDefore we may add Moore's Life of Sheridan; 
the Lives of Lord Castlereagh, Lord Eldon, and Lord Sidmonth ; Romilly's Mem- 
oirs ; Lord Cornwallis's Correspondence ; Mr. Young's Life of Lord Liverpool ; the 
Diaries and Correspondence of Lord Malmesbury, Lord Colchester, and Lord Auck- 
land. For the general history of England at this time, see Alison's "History bf 
Europe;" for its military history, Sir William Napier's "History of the Peninsular 
AVar."] 



From tlie moment when France declared war against England 
Pitt's power was at an end. His pride, his immovable firmness, 
and the general confidence of the nation still kept him at the head 
of affairs; but from this moment he drifted along with a tide of 
popular feeling which he never fully understood. The very ex- 
cellences of his character unfitted him for the conduct of a war. 
He was in fact a Peace Minister, forced into war by a panic and 
enthusiasm which he shared in a very small degree, and unaided 
by his father's gift of at once entering into the sympathies and 
passions around him, or of rousing passions and sympathies in re- 
turn. Politically indeed his task at home became an easy one, for 
the nation was united by its longing to fight. Even the bulk of 
the Whigs, with the Duke of Portland, Lords Fitzwilliara and 
Spenser, and Mr. Wyndham at their head, deserted Fox when he 
remained firm in his love of France and of the Revolution, and 
gave their support to the Ministry, Abroad all seemed at first to 
go ill for France. She was girt in by a ring of enemies : the Em- 
peror, Prussia, Saxony, Sardinia, and Spain were leagued in arms 
against her, and their efforts were seconded by civil war. The 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



^39 



peasants of Poitou and Brittany rose in revolt against the Revo- 
lutionary government. Marseilles and Lyons were driven into in- 
surrection by the Jacobins, as the more violent leaders who had 
now seized the supreme power were called, and a great naval port, 
that of Toulon, not only hoisted the Royalist flag, but admitted 
an English garrison within its Avails, The French armies had al- 
ready been driven back from Belgium and across the Rhine, when 
ten thousand English soldiers, under the Duke of York, joined the 
Austrians in Flanders in 1793. But the chance of crushing the 
Revolution was lost by the greed and incapacity of the allied 
powers. Russia, as Pitt had foreseen, was now free to carry out 
her schemes in the East ; and Austria and Prussia turned from 
the vigorous prosecution of the French war to the final partition 
of Poland. The allies frittered away in sieges the force which 
was ready for an advance into the heart of France, until the re- 
volt of the West and South Avas alike drowned in blood. What- 
ever Avere the crimes and violence of the Jacobin leaders at this 
critical moment, France felt in spite of them the value of the Rev- 
olution, and rallied enthusiastically to its support. In 1794 the 
English Avere driven from Toulon by a young artillery officer from 
Corsica, whose name was to become famous. Napoleon Bonaparte ; 
Avhile a victory at Fleurus again made the French masters of the 
Netherlands. At this moment, too, the overthroAV and death of 
their leader, Maximilian Robespierre, brought about the downfall 
of the Jacobins; and a more moderate government which succeed- 
ed, the government of the Directory, united the Avhole people in 
the defense of the country. Victory every Avhere folloAved on the 
gigantic efibrts with Avhich France met the coalition against it. 
Spain Avas forced to sue for peace, the Sardinians were driven over 
the Alps, the provinces along the Rhine were Avrested from the 
Austrians, and the starving and unshod soldiers of the Republic 
threw back the English army from the Waal and the Meuse and 
entered Amsterdam in triumph. 

The victories of France broke up the confederacy which had 
threatened it with destruction. Spain, Sweden, and Prussia 
hastened to make peace Avith the French Republic. Pitt himself 
became earnest for peace. He was indeed Avithout means of effi- 
ciently carrying on the Avar. The English army Avas small and 
without military experience, Avhile its leaders were utterly incapa- 
ble. " We have no general," Avrote Lord Grenville, the Minister 
for Foreign Affairs, " but some old Avoman in a red ribbon." Nor 
Avere Aveakness and defeat Pitt's only ground for desiring the close 
of the war. Liflexible and impassive as he seemed, he felt bit- 
terly that the contest was undoing all that he had done. The 
growth of the public burdens Avas terrible. If England Avas Avith- 
out soldiers, she had wealth, and Pitt Avas forced to turn her 
Avealth into an engine of Avar. He became the paymaster of the 
Coalition, and his subsidies brought the allied armies into the 
field. Immense loans Avere raised for this purpose, and for a Avar 
expenditure at home which was as useless as it Avas extravagant. 
Tlie public debt rose by leaps and bounds. Taxation, Avhich had 



T70 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



reached its lowest point under Pitt's peace administration, mount- 
ed to a height undreamed of before. Tlie public suffering was in- 
creased by a general panic. Burke had been only too successful 
in his resolve to " diffuse the terror." The partisans of France and 
of Republicanism in England were in reality but a few handfuls of 
men, who played at gathering conventions and at calling them- 
selves citizens and patriots in childish imitation of what was go- 
ing on across the Channel. But the dread of revolution soon 
passed beyond the bounds of reason. Even Pitt, though still ut- 
terly untouched by the jDolitical reaction around him, was shaken 
by the dream of social danger, and believed in the existence of 
" thousands of bandits," who were ready to rise against the 
throne, to murder every landlord, and to sack London. " Paine is 
no fool," he said to his niece, who quoted to him "The Rights of 
Man," in which that author had vindicated the principles of the 
Revolution; "he is perhaps right; but if I did what he wants, I 
should have thousands of bandits on my hands to-morrow, and 
London burned." He shared the belief in a social danger with 
Parliament and with the nation at large. The Habeas Corpus Act 
was suspended, a bill against seditious assemblies restricted the 
liberty of public meeting, and a wider scope was given to the 
Statute of Treasons. Prosecution after prosecution was directed 
against the press ; the sermons of some dissenting ministers were 
indicted as seditious; and the conventions of sympathizers with 
France were roughly broken up. The worst excesses of the panic 
were witnessed in Scotland, where young Whigs, whose only of- 
fense was an advocacy of Parliamentary reform, were sentenced 
to transportation, and where a brutal judge openly expressed his 
regret that the practice of torture in seditious cases sliould hav6 
fallen into disuse. In England, however, tlie social panic soon 
passed away as suddenly as it had come. In 1794 three leaders 
of the Corresponding Society, a body which professed sympathy 
with France — Hardy, Thelwall, and Home Tooke — were brought to 
trial on a charge of high -treason, but their acquittal proved that 
the terror was over. Save for occasional riots, to which the poor 
were goaded by sheer want of bread, no social disturbance appear- 
ed in England through the twenty years of the war. 

But though failure abroad and panic and suffering at home 
made Pitt earnest to close the struggle with the Revolution, he 
stood almost alone in his longings for peace. The nation at large 
was still ardent for war, and its ardor was fired by Barke in his 
" Letters on a Regicide Peace," which denounced Pitt's attempt 
in 1796 to negotiate with France. ISTor Avas France less ardent 
for war than England. Her victories had roused hopes of wider 
conquests, and though General Moreau was foiled in a march on 
Vienna, the wonderful successes of Napoleon Bonaparte, who 
now took the command of the army of the Alps, laid Piedmont 
at her feet. The year 1797 saw Lombardy conquered in a single 
campaign ; and while Spain allied herself with France, and Prus- 
sia concluded a treaty of amity, Austria was forced to purchase 
peace in the treaty of Campo Formio by the cession of the Netli- 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



in 



evlands and Milanese to the French Republic. England was left 
without a single ally. Her credit had sunk to the lowest ebb, and 
the alarm of a French invasion brought about a suspension of cash 
payments on the part of the Bank, while a mutiny of the fleet 
which continued for three months was ended by humiliating con- 
cessions. It was in this darkest hour of the struggle that Burke 
passed away, j)rotesting to the last against the peace which, in 
spite of his previous failure, Pitt tried in 1797 to negotiate at Lille. 
But the Minister's efforts were again foiled by the unquenched ha- 
tred of the two nations. A French threat of invasion put an end 
to the depression and disunion which had grown up in England. 
Credit revived, and in spite of the enormous taxation a public 
subscription poured two millions into the Treasury toward the ex- 
penses of the war. Great military and naval triumphs restored 
the confidence of the nation. In rejecting Pitt's offers of peace 
the Directory had counted on a rising which was looked for in 
Ireland, and on a war in India where Tippoo Sahib, the successor 
of Hyder Ali in Mysore, had vowed to drive the English from the 
south. But in 1798 the Irish rising was crushed in a defeat of the 
insurgents at Vinegar Hill ; and Tippoo's death in the storm of 
his own capital, Seringapatam, only saved him from witnessing the 
English conquest of Mysore. A yet greater success awaited the 
British flag at sea. Throughout the war England had maintained 
her naval supremacy, and the triumphs of her seamen were in 
strange contrast with her weakness on land. At the outset of the 
contest the French fleet was defeated and crippled by Lord Howe 
in a victory which bore the name of the day on which it was won, 
June 21st, 1794. When Spain joined the French, her fleet was at- 
tacked in 1796 by Admiral Jervis off Cape St. Vincent, and driven 
with terrible loss back to Cadiz. "When Holland was conquered 
by France, her navy was used by the conquerors to attack the 
English in the Channel with a view to a descent on Ireland. But 
the Dutch fleet from the Texel was met by a fleet under Admiral 
Duncan, and almost annihilated in a battle off Camperdown in 
1797, an obstinate struggle which showed the Hollanders still 
worthy of their old renown. The next year saw the crowning 
victory of the Nile. After his successes in Italy Napoleon Bona- 
parte had conceived the design of a conquest of Egypt and Syria, 
a march upon Constantinople, and the subjection of the Turkish 
Empire. Only the first step in this vast project was fated to be 
realized. He landed in Egypt, and by a defeat of the Mamelukes 
soon reduced that country to submission. But the thirteen men- 
of-war which had escorted his expedition were found by Admiral 
Nelson in Aboukir Bay, moored close to the shoi'e in a line guard- 
ed at either end by gun-boats and batteries. Nelson resolved to 
thrust his own ships between the French and the shore ; his flag- 
ship led the way ; and after a terrible fight of twelve hours, nine 
of the French vessels were captured and destroyed, two were 
burned, and five thousand French seamen were killed or made 
prisoners. 

The battle of the Nile and the failure of Bonaparte in an inva- 



in 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



sion of Syria aided Pitt to revive the coalition of the Continental 
powers against France. A union of the Russian and Austrian ar- 
mies drove the French back again across the Alps and the Rhine. 
Italy and the Rhineland were lost, and only the tenacity of Gen- 
eral Masseua held Switzerland for the Republic. The part which 
England took in this struggle was an invasion of Holland by a 
force under the Duke of York, which ended in miserable failure ; 
but an English captain, Sir Sidney Smith, foiled Bonaparte's proj- 
ects on Syria by his defense of Acre, and the French general, de- 
spairing of further success, abandoned his army, which surrender- 
ed at a later time to a British expedition, and returned to Europe. 
The confidence of Pitt in the success of the Coalition for the first 
time blinded him to the opening for peace that oflTered itself in the 
new position of French affairs which was brought about by Bona- 
parte's return, by his overthrow of the Directory, and his elevation 
to the office of First Consul of the Rei^ublic. His offers of peace 
were no doubt intended simply to dissolve the Coalition, and gain 
breathing-time for a new organization of France and a new attack 
on Europe ; but their rejection by England was intemperate and 
unwise. The military genius of the First Consul, however, soon 
reversed the hopes of the Allies. In 1800 he crossed the St. Ber- 
nard, and by his victory at Marengo forced Austria to conclude a 
peace at Luneville which fixed the frontiers of France at the 
Rhine, and established a Cisalpine Republic, entirely dependent on 
her, in Lombardy. At the same time, the surrender to England 
of the island of Malta, which had been taken from the Knights of 
St. John by a French fleet, and had ever since been blockaded by 
English ships, stirred the resentment of the Czar Peter, who looked 
on himself as the patron of the Knights ; and at his instigation 
Sweden and Denmark joined Russia in a league of armed neutral- 
ity, and protested against the right of search by which England 
prevented the importation to France in neutral vessels of materials 
Avhich might be used in war. 

But it was at this moment, when England stood once more alone, 
that Pitt won the greatest of his political triumphs in the union of 
Ireland with England. The history of Ireland, from its conquest 
by William the Third up to this time, is one which no Englishman 
can recall without shame. Since the surrender of Limerick every 
Catholic Irishman, and there were five Catholics to every Protest- 
ant, had been treated as a stranger and a foreigner in his own 
country. The House of Lords, the House of Commons, the right 
of voting for representatives in Parliament, the magistracy, all 
corporate offices in towns, all ranks in the army, the bench, the 
bar, the whole administration of government or justice, Avere closed 
against Catholics. Few Catholic landowners had been left by 
the sweeping confiscations which had followed the successive 
revolts of the island, and oppressive laws forced even these few, 
with scant exceptions, to profess Protestantism. Necessity, indeed, 
had brought about a practical tolei'ation of their religion and their 
worship ; but in all social and political matters the native Catholics, 
in other words the immense majority of the people of Ireland, 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



11?. 



were simply hewers of wood and drawei's of water to their Protest- 
ant masters, who still looked on themselves as mere settlers, who 
boasted of their Scotch or English extraction, and who regarded 
the name of " Irishman " as an insult. But small as was this Prot- 
estant body, one half of it fared little better, as far as power was 
concerned, than the Catholics ; for the Presbyterians, who form- 
ed the bulk of the Ulster settlers, were shut out by law from all 
civil, military, and municipal offices. The administration and 
justice of the country were thus kept rigidly in the hands of 
members of the Established Church, a body which comprised about 
a twelfth of the population of the island ; while its government 
was practically monopolized by a few great Protestant landown- 
ers. The rotten boroughs, Avhich had originally been created to 
make the Irish Parliament dependent on the Crown, had by this 
time fallen under the influence of the adjacent landlords, whose 
command of these made them masters of the House of Commons, 
while they formed in person the House of Peers. To such a length 
had this system been carried that at the time of the Union more 
than sixty seats were in the hands of three families alone — that of 
Lord Downshire, of the Ponsonbys, and of the Beresfords. One 
half of the House of Commons, in fact, was returned by a small 
group of nobles, Avho were recognized as "parliamentary under- 
takers," and who undertook to " manage " Parliament on" their 
own terms. Irish politics were for these men a mere means of 
public plunder ; they were glutted with pensions, preferments, and 
bribes in hard cash in return for their services; they were the 
advisers of every lord-lieutenant, and the practical governors of 
the country. The result was what might have been expected ; and 
for more than a century Ireland was the worst-governed country 
in Europe. That its government was not even worse than it was, 
Avas due to its connection with England and the subordination ot 
its Parliament to the English Privy Council. The Irish Parlia- 
ment had no power of originating legislative or financial measures, 
and could only say " yes " or " no " to acts submitted to it by the 
Privy Council in England. The English Parliament, too, claimed 
the right of binding Ireland as well as England by itsenactments, 
and one of its statutes transferred the appellate jurisdiction of the 
Irish Peerage to the English House of Lords. Galling as these 
restrictions were to the plundering aristocracy of Ireland, they 
formed a useful check on its tyranny. But as if to compensate for 
the benefits of this protection, England did her best to annihilate 
Irish commerce and to ruin Irish agriculture. Statutes passed by 
the jealousy of English landowners' forbade the export of Irish cat- 
tle or sheep to English ports. The export of wocl Avas forbidden, 
lest it might interfere with the profits of English wool-growers. 
Poverty was thus added to the curse of misgovernment, and pov- 
erty deepened with the rapid growth of the native population, till 
famine turned the country into a hell. 

The bitter lesson of the last conquest, however, long sufficed to 
check all dreams of revolt among the natives, and the murders 
and riots which sprang, from time to time out of the general mis- 



774 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ery and discontent were roughly repressed Iby the ruling class. 
When revolt threatened at last, the threat came from the ruling 
class itself. Some timid efforts made by the English Government 
at the accession of George the Third to control its tyranny were 
answered by a refusal of money bills, and by a cry for the removal 
of the checks imposed on the independence of the Irish Parlia- 
ment. But it was not till the American war that this cry became 
a political danger. The threat of a French invasion and the want 
of any regular force to oppose it compelled the Government to 
call on Ireland to provide for its own defense, and forty thousand 
volunteers appeared in arms in 1779. The force was wholly a 
Protestant one, commanded by Protestant officers, and it was 
turned to account by the Protestant aristocracy. Threats of an 
armed revolt backed the eloquence of two Parliamentary leaders, 
Grattan and Flood, in their demand of "Irish independence;" and 
the Volunteers bid for the sympathy of the native Catholics, who 
looked with indifference on these quarrels of their masters, by 
claiming for them a relaxation of the penal laws against the ex- 
ercise of their religion and of some of their most oppressive disa- 
bilities. So real was the danger that England was forced to give 
way; and Lord Rockingham induced the British Parliament to 
abandon, in 1782, the judicial and legislative supremacy it had till 
then asserted over that of Ireland. From this moment England 
and Ireland were simply held together by the fact that the sover- 
eign of the one island was also the sovereign of the other. Dur- 
ing the next eighteen years Ireland was " independent ;" but its 
independence was a mere name for the uncontrolled rule of a 
few noble families. The victory of the Volunteers had been won 
simply to the profit of the "undertakers," who returned the ma- 
jority of members in the Irish House of Commons, and them- 
selves formed the Irish House of Lords. The suspension of any 
control or interference from England left Ireland at these men's 
mercy, and they soon showed that they meant to keep it for them- 
selves. When the Catholics claimed admission to the franchise 
or to equal civil rights as a reward for their aid in the late strug- 
gle, their claim was rejected. A similar demand of the Presby- 
terians, who had formed a good half of the Volunteers, for tl;e 
removal of their disabilities was equally set aside. Even Grattan, 
when he pleaded for a reform which would make the Parliament 
at least a fair representative of the Protestant Englishry, utterly 
failed. The ruling class found government too profitable to share 
it with other possessors. It was only by hard bribery that the 
English Government could secure their co-operation in the simplest 
measures of administration. "If ever there was a country unfit 
to govern itself," said Lord Hutchinson, " it is Ireland. A corrupt 
aristocracy, a ferocious commonalty, a distracted Government, a 
divided people!" The real character of this Parliamentary rule 
was seen in the rejection of Pitt's offer of free trade. In Pitt's 
eyes the danger of Ireland lay not so much in its factious aristoc- 
racy as in the misery of the people they governed. Although the 
Irish Catholics were held down by the brjate force of their Prot- 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



775 



estant rulers, he saw that their discontent was growing fast into 
rebellion, and that one secret of their discontent at any rate lay- 
in Irish poverty, a poverty increased, if not originally brought about, 
by the jealous exclusion of Irish products from their natural mar- 
kets in England itself. One of his first commercial measures put 
an end to this exclusion by a bill which established freedom of 
trade between the two islands. But though he met successfully 
the fears and jealousies of the English farmers -and manufacturers, 
he was foiled by the factious ignorance of the Irish landowners, 
and his bill was rejected by the Irish Parliament. So utterly 
was he discouraged that only the outbreak of the Revolutionary 
struggle, and the efforts which France at once made to excite 
rebellion among the Irish Catholics, roused him to fresh measures 
of conciliation and good government. In 1792 he forced on the 
Irish Parliament measures for the admission of Catholics to the 
electoral franchise, and to civil and military offices within the 
island, which promised to open a new era of religious liberty. 
But the promise came too late. The hope of conciliation was 
lost in the fast rising tide of religious and social passion. An as- 
sociation of "United Irishmen," begun among the Protestants of 
Ulster with a view of obtaining Parliamentary reform, drifted into 
a correspondence with France and projects of insurrection. The 
Catholic peasantry, brooding over their misery and their wrongs, 
Avere equally stirred by the news from France ; and their discon- 
tent broke out in the outrages of " Defenders " and " Peep-o'-day 
Boys," who held the country in terror. For a while, however, the 
Protestant landowners, banded together in " Orange Societies," 
held the country down by sheer terror and bloodshed. 

At last the smouldering discontent and disaffection burst into 
flame. Ireland was in fact driven into rebellion by the lawless 
cruelty of the Orange yeomanry and the English troops. In 1796 
and 1797 soldiers and yeomanry marched over the country tor- 
turing and scourging the " croppies," as the Irish insurgents were 
called in derision from their short-cut hair, robbing, ravishing, and 
murdering. Their outrages were sanctioned by a Bill of Indemnity 
passed by the Irish Parliament, and protected for the future by an 
Insurrection Act and a suspension of the Habeas Corpus. Mean- 
while the United Irishmen prepared for an insurrection, which was 
delayed by the failure of the French expeditions on which they had 
counted for support, and above all by the victory of Camperdown. 
Atrocities were answered by atrocities, when the revolt at last 
broke out in 1798. Loyal Protestants were lashed and tortured in 
their turn, and every soldier taken was butchered without mercy. 
The rebels, however, no sooner mustered fifteen thousand men 
strong in a camp on Vinegar Hill near Enniscorthy than the camp 
Avas stormed by the English troops, and the revolt utterly sup- 
pressed. The suppression only just came in time to prevent 
greater disasters. A few weeks after the close of the rebellion a 
thousand French soldiers under General Humbert landed in Mayo, 
broke a force of thrice their number in a battle at Castlebar, and 
only surrendered when the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Cornwallis, 



776 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



faced tlieni with thirty thousand men. Lord Cornwallis, a wise 
and humane ruler, found more difficulty in checking the reprisals 
of his troops and of the Orangemen than in stamping out the last 
embers of insurrection ; but the hideous cruelty brought about one 
good result. Pitt's disgust at " the bigoted fury of Irish Protest- 
ants" ended in a firm resolve to i:)Ut an end to the farce of" Inde- 
pendence," which left Ireland helpless in their hands. The polit- 
ical necessity for a union of the two islands had already been 
brought home to every English statesman by the course of the 
Irish Parliament during the disputes over the Regency; for, 
while England repelled the claims of the Prince of Wales to the 
Regency as of right, Ireland admitted them. As the only union 
left between the two peoples Avas their obedience to a common 
ruler, such an act might conceivably have ended in their entire 
severance; and the sense of this danger secured a welcome on this 
side of the Channel for Pitt's proposal to unite the two Parlia- 
ments. The opposition of the Irish borough-mongers was natural- 
ly stubborn and determined. But with them it was a sheer ques- 
tion of gold ; and the assent of the Irish Parliament was bought 
with a million in money, and with a liberal distribution of pensions 
and peerages to its members. Base and shameless as such meanfe 
were, Pitt may fairly plead that they were the only means by 
which the bill for the Union could have been passed. As the mat- 
ter was finally arranged in June, 1800, one hundred Irish members 
became part of the House of Commons at Westminster, and twen- 
ty-eight temporal with four spiritual peers, chosen for each Parlia- 
ment by their fellows, took their seats in the House of Lords. 
Commerce between the two countries was freed from all restric- 
tions, and all the trading privileges of the one were thrown open* 
to the other; while taxation was j^i'oportionately distributed be- 
tween the two peoples. 

The lavish creation of peers which formed a part of the price 
paid for the union of Ireland was only an instance of Pitt's delib- 
erate policy in dealing with the peerage. If he had failed to re- 
form the House of Commons, he was able to bring about a prac- 
tical change in our constitution by his reform of the House of 
Lords. Few bodies have varied more in the number of their 
members. At the close of the Wars of the Roses only thirty lay 
lords remained to take their seats; in Elizabeth's reign they num- 
bered only sixty ; the prodigal creations of the Stuarts raised them 
to one hundred and sixty- eight. At this point, however, they 
practically remained stationary during the reigns of the first two 
Georges ; and, as we have seen, only the dogged opposition of 
Walpole prevented Lord Stanhope from limiting the peerage to 
the number it had at that time reached. Mischievous as such a 
measure would have been, it would at any rate have prevented 
the lavish creation of peerages on which George the Third relied 
in the early days of his reign as one of his means of breaking up 
the part)^ government which restrained him. But what was with 
the King a mere means of corruption became witli Pitt a settled 
purpose of transferring the peerage from a narrow and exclusive 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



caste into a large representation of the wealth of Englaud. As he 
defined his aim, it was to use the House of Lords as a means of re- 
warding merit, to bring the peerage into closer relations with the 
land-owning and opulent classes, and to render the Crown inde- 
pendent of factious combinations among the existing j^eers. While 
laimself, therefore, disdainful of hereditary honors, he lavished them 
as no Minister had lavished them before. In his first five years of 
rule he created fifty new peers. In two later years alone, 1796-97, 
he created thirty-five. By ISOl the peerages which were the 
l^rice of the union with Ireland liad helped to raise his creations 
to one hundred and forty-one. So busily was his example follow- 
ed by his successors, that at the end of George the Third's reign 
the number of hereditary peers had become double what it Avas 
at his accession. Nor was the change in the peerage merely one 
of numbers. The whole character of the House of Lords was 
changed. Up to this time it had been a small assembly of great 
nobles, bound together by family or party ties into a distinct pow- 
er in the State. By pouring into it members of the middle and 
commercial class, who formed the basis of his political power, 
small landowners, bankers, merchants, nabobs, army contract- 
ors, lawyers, soldiers, and seamen, Pitt revolutionized the Upper 
House. It became the stronghold, not of blood, but of property, 
the representative of the great estates and great fortunes which 
the vast increase of English wealth was building up. For the 
first time, too, in our history it became the distinctly conservative 
element in our constitution. The full import of Pitt's changes has 
still to be revealed, but in some ways their results have been very 
difierent from the end at which he aimed. The larger number 
of the peerage, though due to the will of the Crown, has practical- 
ly freed the House from any influence which the Crown can exert 
by the distribution of honors. This change, since the power of the 
Crown has been practically wielded by the House of Commons, 
has rendered it far harder to reconcile the free action of the Lords 
with the regular working of constitutional government. On the 
other hand, the larger number of its members has rendered the 
House more responsive to public opinion, when public opinion is 
strongly pronounced; and the political tact which is inherent in 
great aristocratic assemblies has hitherto prevented any collision 
with the Lower House from being pushed to an irreconcilable 
quarrel. Perhaps the most direct result of the change is seen in 
the undoubted popularity of the House of Lords with the mass of 
the people. The large number of its members, and the constant 
additions to it from almost every class of the community, have 
secured it as yet from the suspicion and ill-will which in almost 
every other constitutional country has hampered the eftective 
working of a second legislative chamber. 

But the legislative union of the two countries was only part of 
the great plan which Pitt had conceived for the conciliation of 
Ireland. With the conclusion of the Union his projects of free 
trade between the two countries, which had been defeated a few- 
years back by the folly of the Irish Parliament, came quietly into 



Seo. IV. 



778 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



play ; and in spite of insufficient capital and social disturbance, 
the growth of the trade, shipping, and manufactures of Ireland 
has gone on without a check from that time to this. The change 
which brought Ireland directly under the common Parliament 
was followed too by a gradual revision of its oppressive laws and 
an amendment in their administration ; taxation was lightened, 
and a faint beginning made of public instruction. But in Pitt's 
mind the great means of conciliation was the concession of relig- 
ious equality. In proposing to the English Parliament the union 
of the two countries he had pointed out that, when thus joined to 
a Protestant country like England, all danger of a Catholic su- 
premacy in Ireland, should Catholic disabilities be removed, w^ould 
be practically at an end ; and had suggested that in such a case 
"an effectual and adequate provision for the Catholic clergy "would 
be a security for their loyalty. His words gave strength to the 
hopes of" Catholic Emancipation," or the removal of the civil dis- 
abilities of Catholics, which were held out by Lord Castlereagh in 
Ireland itself as means of hindering any opposition to the project 
of Union on the part of the Catholics, It was agreed on all sides 
that their opposition would have secured its defeat; but no Cath- 
olic opposition showed itself. After the passing of the bill, Pitt 
prepared to lay before the Cabinet a measure Avhich would have 
raised not only the Catholic, but the Dissenter, to perfect equality 
of civil rights. He proposed to remove all religious tests which 
limited the exercise of the franchise, or were required for admis- 
sion to Parliament, the magistracy, the bar, municipal offices, or 
posts in the army or the service of the State, Political security 
was provided for by the imposition, in the place of the Sacrament-^ 
al Test, of an oath of allegiance and of fidelity to the Constitution ; 
while the loyalty of the Catholic and Dissenting clergy was se- 
cured by the grant of some provision to both by the State. To 
conciliate the Church, measures were added for strengthening its 
means of discipline, and for inci'easing the stipends of its poorer 
ministers. A commutation of tithes was to remove a constant 
source of quarrel in Ii-eland between the Episcopal clergy and the 
people. The scheme was too large and statesman-like to secure 
the immediate assent of the Cabinet, and before that assent could 
be won the plan was communicated through the treachery of the 
Chancellor, Lord Loughborough, to George the Third. "I count 
any man my personal enemy," the King broke out angrily to Dun- 
das. " who proposes any such measure." Pitt answered this out- 
burst by submitting his whole plan to the King. " Tlie politic- 
al circumstances under which the exclusive laws originated," he 
wrote, " arising either from the conflicting power of hostile and 
nearly balanced sects, from the apprehension of a Popish Queen 
as successor, a disputed succession, and a foreign pretender, a di- 
vision in Europe between Catholic and Protestant powers, are 
no longer applicable to the present state of things." But argu- 
ment was wasted upon George the Third. In spite of the decis- 
ion of the lawyers whom he consulted, the King held himself bound 
by his Coronation Oath to maintain the tests; and his bigotr}' 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



V79 



agreed too well with the religious hatred and political distrust 
of the Catholics which still prevailed among the bulk of the En- 
glish people not to make his decision fatal to the hill. Pitt, how- 
ever, held firm to its principle; he resigned in February, 1801, and 
was succeeded by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Mr. Ad- 
dington, a man as dull and bigoted as George himself. 

Hardly a single member of the Addington Ministry could be 
regarded as rising even to the second rank of political eminence, 
but their work was mainly one of peace. Although the debt had 
risen from 244 millions to 520, the desire for peace sprang from no 
sense of national exhaustion. On the contrary, wealth had never 
increased so fast. Steam and canals, with the inventions of Ark- 
wright and Crorapton, were producing their effect in a rapid de- 
velopment of trade and manufactures, and commerce found fresh 
outlets in tlie colonies gained by the war ; for the union of Hol- 
land with the French Republic had been followed by the seizure 
of the Cape of Good Hope, of Ceylon, of Malacca, and of the Dutch 
possessions in the Spice Islands. Nor was there any ground for 
despondency in the aspect of the war itself The treaty of Lune- 
ville, as we have seen, left England alone in the struggle against 
France; while an armed neutrality of the Northern powers, with 
the Czar Peter of Russia at its head, revived the claim that a neu- 
tral flag should cover even contraband of war. But in 1800 the 
surrender of Malta to the English fleet gave it the mastery of the 
Mediterranean; and General Abercromby, landing with a small 
force in Aboukir Bay, defeated, on the 21st of March, 1801, the 
French army that Bonaparte had left in Egypt, and which soon 
found itself forced to surrender in the Convention of Cairo. By 
its evacuation of Egypt, India was secured and Turkey saved 
from sinking, into a dependency of France. In April a British 
fleet appeared before Copenhagen, and after a desperate struggle 
silenced the Danish batteries, captured the bulk of the Danish 
ships, and forced Denmark to withdraw from the ISTorthern Co- 
alition, which was finally broken up by the death of the Czar, 
Both jDarties in this gigantic struggle, however, were at last anx- 
ious for peace. On the English side there was a general sense that 
the struggle with the Revolution was in fact at an end. Not only 
had England held its principles at bay, but the war had at last 
seated on the throne of France a military despot who hated the 
principles of the Revolution even more than England did. So far 
as France herself was concerned, the First Consul, Bonaparte, was 
eager at the moment for a peace which would enable him to es- 
tablish his power, and to crush the last sparks of freedom in the 
country of which he had made himself in reality the absolute 
master. 

After long negotiations, the Peace of Amiens was concluded in 
March, 1802, on terms of mutual restitution. France promised to 
retire from Southern Italy, and to leave the new republics it had 
established in the countries along its border to themselves. En- 
gland engaged to give up her newly conquered colonies save 
Ceylon, and to replace the Knights of St. John in the isle of 



V80 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



Malta. " It is a peace which every body is glad of and nobody 
is proud of," said a witty critic; but there was a general sense of 
relief at the close of the long struggle, and the new French em- 
bassador was drawn in triumph on his arrival through the streets 
of London. But the peace brought no rest to Bonaparte's ambi- 
tion. It was soon plain that England would have to bear the 
brunt of a new contest, but of a contest wholly ditferent in kind 
from that which the peace had put an end to. Whatever had been 
the errors of the French Revolutionists, even their worst attacks 
on the independence of the nations around them had been veiled 
by a vague notion of freeing the peoples whom they invaded from 
the yoke of their rulers. But the aim of Bonaparte Avas simply 
that of a vulgar conqueror. He was resolute to be master of the 
Western world, and no notions of popular freedom or sense of na- 
tional right ever interfered with his resolve. The means at his 
command were immense. The political life of the Revolution had 
been cut short by his military despotism, but the new social vigor 
it had given to France through the abolition of privileges and the 
creation of a new middle class on the ruins of the clergy and the 
nobles still lived on. While the dissensions which tore France 
asunder were hushed by the policy of the First Consul, by his res- 
toration of the Church as a religious power, his recall of the ex- 
iles, and the economy and wise administration which distinguish- 
ed his rule, the centralized system of government bequeathed by 
the Monarchy to the Revolution and by the Revolution to Bona- 
parte enabled him easily to seize this national vigor for the profit 
of his own despotism. The exhaustion of the brilliant hopes raised 
by the Revolution, the craving for public order, the military en- 
thusiasm and the impulse of a new glory given by the wonderful 
victories France had won, made a tyranny possible; and in the 
hands of Bonaparte this tyranny was supported by a secret police, 
by the suppression of the press and of all freedom of opinion, and, 
above all, by the iron will and immense ability of the First Con- 
sul himself. Once chosen Consul for life, he felt himself secure at 
home, and turned restlessly to the work of outer aggression. The 
republics established on the borders of France were brought into 
mere dependence on his will. Piedmont and Parma were annex- 
ed to France; and a French army occupied Switzerland. The 
temperate protests of the English Government were answered by 
demands for the expulsion of the French exiles who had been liv- 
ing in England ever since the Revolution, and for its surrender 
of Malta, which was retained till some security could be devised 
against a fresh seizure of the island by the French fleet. It was 
plain that a struggle was inevitable ; and in May, 1803, the arma- 
ments preparing in the French ports hastened the formal declara- 
tion of war. 

Whatever differences might have parted Whig from Tory in 
the earlier war with the Revolution, all were at one in tlie Avar 
against the ambition of Bonaparte. England was now the one 
country where freedom in any sense remained alive. "Every oth- 
er monument of European liberty has perished," cried Sir James 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



V81 



Mackintosh, one of the most eminent of Whig leaders. " That an- 
cient fabric which has been gradually raised by the wisdom and 
virtue of our forefathers still stands ; but it stands alone, and it 
stands among ruins !" With the fall of England despotism would 
have been universal throughout Europe ; and it was at England 
that Bonaparte resolved to strike the first blow in his career of 
conquest. "Fifteen millions of people," he said, in allusion to the 
disproportion between the population of England and France, 
" must give way to forty millions." His attempt to strike at the 
English power in India through the Mahrattas of the central 
provinces was foiled by their defeat at Assaye; but an invasion 
of England itself was planned on a gigantic scale. A camp of 
one hundred thousand men was formed at Boulogne, and a host 
of flat-bottomed boats gathered for their conveyance across the 
Channel. The peril of the nation not only united all political 
parties, but recalled Pitt to power. On the retirement of Ad- 
dington in 1804, Pitt proposed to include Fox and the leading 
Whigs in his new Ministry, but he was foiled by the bigotry of 
the King ; and the refusal of Lord Grenville and of Wyndham to 
take office without Fox, as well as the loss of his post at a later 
time by his ablest supporter, Dundas, left Pitt almost alone. His 
health was broken, and his appearance was haggard and depress- 
ed ; but he faced difficulty and danger with the same courage 
as of old. The invasion seemed imminent Avhen Napoleon, who 
had now assumed the title of Emperor, appeared in the camp at 
Boulogne. "Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours," he 
is reported to have said, " and we are masters of the world." A 
skillfully combined plan by which the British fleet would have 
been divided, while the whole French navy was concentrated in 
the Channel, was delayed by the death of the admiral destined to 
execute it. But an alliance with Spain placed the Spanish fleet at 
Napoleon's disposal in 1805, and he formed a fresh scheme for its 
union with that of France, the crushing of the squadron under 
Cornwallis which blocked the ports of the Channel before Admiral 
Nelson could come to its support, and a crossing of the vast arma- 
ment thus protected to the English shore. Three hundred thou- 
sand volunteers mustered in England to meet the coming attack; 
but Pitt trusted more to a new league which he had succeeded in 
forming on the Continent itself The annexation of Genoa by Na- 
poleon aided him in this eflibrt ; and Russia, Austria, and Sweden 
joined in an alliance to wrest Italy and the Low Countries from 
the grasp of the French Emperor. Napoleon meanwhile swept 
the sea in vain for a glimpse of the great armament whose assem- 
bly in the Channel he had so skillfully planned. Admiral Ville- 
neuve, uniting the Spanish ships at Corunna with his own squad- 
ron from Toulon, drew Nelson in pursuit to the West Indies, and 
then, suddenly returning to Cadiz, hastened to unite with the 
French squadron at Brest and crush the English fleet in the Chan- 
nel. But a headlong pursuit brought Nelson up Avith him ere tlie 
manoeuvre was complete, and the two fleets met on the 21st of 
October, 1805, off Cape Trafalgar. "England," ran Nelson's fa- 



f82 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



mous signal, " expects every man to do his duty ;" and though he 
fell himself in the hour of victory, twenty French sail had struck 
their flag ere the day was done. "England has saved herself by 
her courage," Pitt said in what were destined to be his last public 
words: "she will save Europe by her example." But even be- 
fore the victory of Trafalgar ISTapoleon had abandoned the dream 
of invading England to meet the coalition in his rear ; and swing- 
ing round his forces on the Danube, he forced an Austrian army to 
a shameful capitulation in Ulra, three days before his final naval de- 
feat. From Ulm he marched on Vienna, and crushed the combined 
armies of Austria and Russia in the battle of Austerlitz. "Aus- 
terlitz," Wilberforce wrote in his diary, " killed Pitt." Though 
he was still but forty-seven, the hollow voice and wasted frame of 
the great Minister had long told that death was near; and the 
blow to his hopes proved fatal. " Roll up that map," he said, 
pointing to a map of Europe which hung upon the wall; "it will 
not be wanted these ten years." Once only he rallied from stu- 
por; and tliose who bent over him caught a faint murmur of "My 
country! How I leave my country!" On the 23d of January, 
1808, he breathed his last ; and was laid in Westminster Abbey, in 
the grave of Chatham. " What grave," exclaimed Lord Welles- 
ley, " contains such a father and such a son ! What sepulchre em- 
bosoms the remains of so much human excellence and glory !" 

So great was felt to be the loss, that nothing but the union of 
parties, which Pitt had in vain desired during his lifetime, could 
fill up t]:e gap left by his death. In the new Ministry, Fox, with 
the small body of popular Whigs who were bent on peace and 
internal reform, united with the aristocratic Whigs under Lord^ 
Grenville and Avith the Tories under Lord Sidmouth. All home 
questions, in fact, were subordinated to the need of saving Europe 
from the ambition of France, and in the resolve to save Europe 
Fox was as resolute as Pitt himself His hopes of peace, indeed, 
were stronger; but they were foiled by the evasive answer which 
Napoleon gave to his overtures, and by a new war which he un- 
dertook against Prussia, the one power which seemed able to i-e- 
sist the arms of France. By the fatal indecision of the Ministry 
Prussia was left unaided till it was too late to aid her ; and on the 
14th of October, 1806, the decisive victory of Jena laid North Ger- 
many at Napoleon's feet. Death had saved Fox only a month be- 
fore from witnessing the overthrow of his hopes; and his loss 
weakened the Grenville Cabinet at the moment Avhen one of its 
greatest errors opened a new and more desperate struggle with 
France, By a violent stretch of her rights as a combatant En- 
gland declared the whole coast occupied by France and its allies, 
from Dantzic to Trieste, to be in a state of blockade. It was im- 
possible to enforce such a " paper blockade," even by the immense 
force at her disposal ; and Napoleon seized on the opportunity to 
retaliate by the entire exclusion of British commerce from the 
Continent, an exclusion which he trusted would end the war by 
the ruin it would bring on the English manufactures. Decrees 
issued from Berlin and Milan ordered the seizure of all British ex- 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



783 



ports and of vessels which had touched at any British port. The 
result of these decrees would, he hoped, prove the ruin of the car- 
rying trade of Britain, which would pass into the hands of neutrals 
and especially of the Americans; and it was to prevent this result 
that the Grenville Ministry issued Orders in Council in January, 
1807, by which neutral vessels voyaging to coasts subject to the 
blockade already declared were compelled, on pain of seizure, to 
touch previously at some British port. The germs of a yet wider 
struggle lay in these orders; but the fall of the Grenville Minis- 
try was due not so much to its reckless foreign policy as to its 
M'ise and generous policy at home. Its greatest work, the aboli- 
tion of the slave-trade in February, was done in the teeth of a 
vigorous opposition from the Tories and the merchants of Liver- 
pool ; and the first indications of a desire to bring about Catholic 
Emancipation was met on the part of the King by the demand of 
a pledge not to meddle with the question, and by the dismissal of 
the Ministry in March on their refusal to give it. 

The dismissal of the Grenville Ministry broke up the union of 
parties ; and from this time to the end of the war England was 
wholly governed by the Tories. The nominal head of the Minis- 
try which succeeded that of Lord Grenville was the Duke of Port- 
land ; its guiding spirit was the Foreign Secretary, George Can- 
ning, a young and devoted adherent of Pitt, whose brilliant rheto- 
ric gaye him power over the House of Commons, while the vigor 
and breadth of his mind gave a new energy and color to the war. 
At no time had opposition to Napoleon seemed so hopeless. From 
Berlin the Emperor marched into the heart of Poland, and though 
checked in the winter by the Russian forces in the hard-fought 
battle of Eylau, his victory of Friedland brought the Czar Alex- 
ander in the summer of 1807 to consent to the Peace of Tilsit. 
From foes the two Emperors of the West and the East became 
friends, and the hope of French aid in the conquest of Turkey 
drew Alexander to a close alliance with Napoleon. Russia not 
only enforced the Berlin decrees against British commerce, but 
forced Sweden, the one ally which England still retained on the 
Continent, to renounce her alliance. The Russian and Swedish 
fleets were thus placed at the service of France, and the two Em- 
perors counted on securing the fleet of Denmark, and threatening 
by this union the maritime supremacy which formed England's 
real defense. The hope was foiled by the appearance off Elsinore 
in July, 1807, of an expedition, promptly and secretly equipped by 
Canning, with a demand for the surrender of the Danish fleet into 
the hands of England, on pledge of its return at the close of the 
war. On the refusal of the Danes the demand was enforced by a 
bombardment of Copenhagen ; and the whole Danish fleet, with a 
vast mass of naval stores, were carried to British poi'ts. But what- 
ever Canning did to check France at sea, he could do nothing to 
arrest her progress on land. Napoleon was drunk with success. 
He was absolutely master of Western Europe, and its whole face 
changed as at an enchanter's touch. Prussia was occupied by 
French troops. Holland was changed into a monarchy by a sim- 

50 ' 



784 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



pie decree of the French Emperor, and its crown bestowed on his 
brother Louis. Another brother, Jerome, became King of West- 
phalia, a new realm built up out of the Electorates of Hesse-Cassel 
and Hanover. A third brother, Joseph, was made King of Naples ; 
while the rest of Italy, and even Rome itself, was annexed to the 
French Empire. 

As little opposition met Napoleon's first aggressions in the 
Peninsula. In the Treaty of Fontainebleau (October, 1807) France 
and Spain agreed to divide Portugal between them ; and the reign- 
ing House of Braganza fled helplessly from Lisbon to a refuge in 
Brazil. But the seizure of Portugal was only meant as a prelude 
to the seizure of Spain, Charles the Fourth, whom a riot in his 
capital bad driven to abdication, and his son Ferdinand the Seventh 
were drawn to Bayonne in May, 1808, on pretext of an interview 
with the Emperor, and forced to resign their claims to the Spanish 
crown, while the French army entered Madrid and proclaimed 
Joseph Bonaparte King of Spain. This infamous act of treachery 
W'as hardly completed when Spain rose as one man against the 
stranger ; and desperate as the effort of its people seemed, the 
news of the rising was welcomed throughout England Avith a 
burst of enthusiastic joy. "Hitherto," cried Sheridan, a leader 
of the Whig opposition, " Bonaparte has contended with princes 
without dignity, numbers without ardor, or peoples without pa- 
triotism. He has yet to learn what it is to combat a people who 
are animated by one spirit against him." Tory and Whig alike 
held that " never had so happy an opportunity existed for Britain 
to strike a bold stroke for the rescue of the world ;" and Canning 
at once resolved to change the system of desultory descents on 
colonies and sugar islands for a vigorous warfare in the Peninsula. 
Supplies were sent to the Spanish insurgents with reckless pro- 
fusion, and two small armies placed under the command of Sir 
John Moore and Sir Arthur Wellesley for service in the Peninsula. 
In July, 1808, the surrender at Baylen of a French force w^hich 
had invaded Andalusia gave the first shock to the power of Na- 
poleon, and the blow was followed by one almost as severe. Land- 
ing at the Mondego with fifteen thousand men. Sir Arthur Welles- 
ley drove the French army of Portugal from the field of Vimiera, 
and forced it to surrender in the Convention of Cintra on the 30th 
of August. In Spain itself the tide of success was soon roughly 
turned by the appearance of Napoleon with an army of two hun- 
dred thousand men ; and Moore, who had advanced from Lisbon 
to Salamanca to support the Spanish armies, found them crushed 
on the Ebro, and was forced to fall hastily back on the coast. 
His force saved its honor in a battle before Corunna, on the 16th 
of January, 1809, which enabled it to embark in safety; but else- 
where all seemed lost. The whole of Northern and Central Spain 
was held by the French armies ; and even Zaragoza, Avhich had 
once heroically rej)ulsed them, submitted after a second desperate 
siege. 

The landing of the wreck of Moore's army and the news of the 
Spanish defeats turned the temper of England from the wildest 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



785 



hope to the deepest despair; but Canning remained unmoved. 
On the day of the evacuation of Corunna he signed a treaty of al- 
liance with the Spanish Junta at Cadiz ; and the English force at 
Lisbon, which had already prepared to leave Portugal, was rein- 
forced with thirteen thousand fresh troops and placed under the 
command of Sir Arthur Wellesley. " Portugal," Wellesley wrote 
coolly, "may be defended against any force which the French can 
bring against it." At this critical moment the best of the French 
troops M'ith the Emperor himself were drawn from the Peninsula 
to the Danube ; for the Spanish rising had roused Austria as well 
as England to a renewal of the struggle. When Marshal Soult, 
therefore, threatened Lisbon from the north, Wellesley marched 
boldly against him, drove him from Ojiorto in a disastrous retreat, 
and suddenly changing his line of operations, pushed with twenty 
thousand men by Abrantes on Madrid. He was joined on the 
march by a Spanish force of thirty thousand men ; and a bloody 
action of two days with a French army of equal force at Talavera, 
on the 27th of July, 1809, restored the renown of English arms. 
The losses on both sides were enormous, and the French fell back 
at the close of the struggle ; but the fruits of the victory were lost 
by the sudden appearance of Soult on the Engli,gh line of advance, 
and Wellesley was forced to retreat hastily on Badajoz. His fail- 
ure was imbittered by heavier disasters elsewhere. Austria was 
driven to sue for jjeace by Napoleon's victory at Wagram ; and a 
force of forty thousand English soldiers which had been dispatched 
against Antwerp in July returned home baffled, after losing half its 
numbers in the marshes of Walcheren. 

The failure at Walcheren brought about the fall of the Portland 
Ministry. Canning attributed the disaster to the incompetence of 
Lord Castlereagh, an Irish peer who, after taking the chief part in 
bringing about the union between England and L*eland, had been 
raised by the Duke of Portland to the post of Secretary of War ; 
and the quarrel between the two Ministers ended in a duel and in 
the resignation of their offices (September, 1809). The Duke of 
Portland retired ; and a new Ministry was formed out of the more 
Tory members of the late administration under the guidance of 
Spencer Perceval, an industrious medioci'ity of the narrowest type ; 
the Marquis of Wellesley, a brother of the English general in 
Spain, becoming Foreign Secretary. But if Perceval and his col- 
leagues possessed few of the higher qualities of statesmanship, they 
had one chai'acteristic which in the actual position of English af- 
fairs was beyond all price. They were resolute to continue the 
Avar. In the nation at large the fit of enthusiasm had been fol- 
lowed by a fit of despair ; and the City of London even petitioned 
for a withdrawal of the English forces from the Peninsula. Na- 
poleon seemed irresistible, and, now that Austria was crushed and 
England stood alone in opposition to him, the Emperor resolved to 
put an end to the strife by a strict enforcement of the Continental 
System and a vigorous prosecution of the war in Spain. Anda- 
lusia, the one province which remained independent, was invaded 
in the opening of 1810, and with the exception of Cadiz reduced to 



786 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



submission. Marshal Massena, with a fine army of eighty thousand 
men, marched upon Lisbon. Even Perceval abandoned all hope 
of preserving a hold on the Peninsula in face of these nevi^ efforts, 
and threw on Wellesley, who had been raised to the peerage as 
Lord Wellington after Talavera, the responsibility of resolving to 
remain there. But the cool judgment and firm temper which dis- 
tinguished Wellington enabled him to face a responsibility from 
which weaker men would have shrunk. " I conceive," he answer- 
ed, "that the honor and interest of our country require that we 
should hold our ground here as long as possible; and, please God, 
I will maintain it as long as I can." By the addition of Portu- 
guese troops who had been trained under British ofiicers, his army 
was now raised to fifty thousand men ; and though his inferiority 
in force had compelled him to look on while Massena reduced the 
frontier fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, he inflicted on 
him a heavy check at the heights of Busaco, and finally fell back 
in October, 1810, on three lines of defense which he had secretly 
constructed at Torres Vedras, along a chain of mountain heights 
crowned with redoubts and bristling with cannon. The position 
was impregnable ; and able and stubborn as Massena was, he found 
himself forced aft^g^- a month's fruitless efforts to fall back in a 
masterly retreat ; but so terrible were the privations of the French 
army in passing again through the wasted country, that it was 
only with forty thousand men that he reached Ciudad Rodrigo in 
the spring of 1811. Reinforced by fresh troops, Massena turned 
fiercely to the relief of Almeida, which Wellington had besieged ; 
but two days' bloody and obstinate fighting on the 3d and 5th of 
May, 1811, failed to drive the English army from its position at 
Fuentes de Onore, and the Marshal fell back on Salamanca, and 
relinquished his effort to drive Wellington from Portugal. 

Great as was the effect of Torres Vedras in restoring the spirit 
of the English people, and in reviving throughout Europe the hope 
of resistance to the tyranny of Napoleon, its immediate result was 
little save the deliverance of Portugal. The French remained 
masters of all Spain save Cadiz and the Eastern provinces, and 
even the east coast was reduced in 1811 by the vigor of General 
Suchet. An attempt of Wellington to retake Badajoz was foiled 
by the co-operation of the army of the South under Marshal Soult 
with that of the North under Marshal Marmont ; and a fruitless 
attack on Almeida wasted the rest of the year. Not only M'as the 
French hold on Spain too strong to be shaken by the force at Wel- 
lington's disposal, but the Continental System of Napoleon was 
beginning to involve England in dangers which he was far from 
having foreseen. His effort to exclude English exjDorts from the 
Continent had been foiled by the rise of a vast system of contra- 
band trade, by the evasions practiced in the Prussian and Russian 
ports, and by the I'apid development of the carrying trade under 
neutral flags. The French army itself was clad in great-coats 
made at Leeds, and shod with shoes from Northampton. But if 
Napoleon's direct blow at England had failed to bring about any 
serious results, the Orders in Council with which the Grenville 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



187 



Ministry had attempted to pi'event the transfer of the carrying 
trade from English to neutral ships, by compelling all vessels on 
their way to ports under blockade to touch at British harbors, had 
at once created serious embarrassments with America. A year 
after the issue of these Orders America replied to both combatants 
by a Non-intercourse Act (March, 1808), which suspended all trade 
between either France or England and the United States. Napo- 
leon adroitly met this measure by an offer to withdraw the restric- 
tions he had imposed on neutral trade if America compelled En- 
gland to show equal respect to her flag ; but no concession could 
be obtained from the Perceval Cabinet. The quarrel between the 
two countries was imbittered by the assertion on England's side 
of a " right of search," which compelled American vessels to sur- 
render any British subjects who formed part of their crew and 
who were claimed as deserters from the English navy. In 1811 
Napoleon fulfilled his pledge of removing all obstacles to Ameri- 
can trade, and America repealed the Non-intercourse Act as far as 
it related to France. But no corresponding concession could be 
wrung from the English Government ; though the closing of the 
American ports inflicted a heavier blow on British commerce than 
any which the Orders could have aimed at pi^vehting. During 
1811, indeed, English exports were reduced by one third of their 
whole amount. In America the irritation at last brought about a 
cry for war which, in spite of the resolute opposition of the New 
England States, forced Congress to raise an army of twenty-five 
thousand men, and to declare the impressment of seamen sailing 
under an American flag to be piracy. England at last consented 
to withdraw her Orders in Council, but the concession was made too 
late to avert a declaration of war on the part of the United States 
in June, 1812. 

The moment when America entered into the great struggle was 
a critical moment in the histor}^ of mankind. Six days after Presi- 
dent Madison issued his declaration of war Napoleon crossed the 
Niemen on his march to Moscow. Successful as his Continental 
il|/-stem had been in stirring up war between England and Ameri- 
ca, it had been no less successful in breaking the alliance which he 
had made with the Emperor Alexander at Tilsit and in forcing on 
a contest with Russia which was destined to be a fatal one. On 
the one hand. Napoleon was irritated by the refusal of Russia to 
enforce strictly the suspension of all trade with England, though 
such a suspension would have ruined the Russian landowners. 
On the other, the Czar saw with growing anxiety the advance of 
the French Empire which sprang from Napoleon's resolve to en- 
force his system by a seizure of the northern coast. In 1811 Hol- 
land, the Hanseatic towns, part of Westphalia, and the Duchy of 
Oldenburg were successively annexed, and the Duchy of Mecklen- 
burg threatened with seizure. A peremptory demand on the part 
of France for the entire cessation of intercourse with England 
brought the quarrel to a head; and preparations were made on 
both sides for a gigantic struggle. The best of the French sol- 
diers were drawn from Spain to the frontier of Poland ; and Wei- 



r88 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



lington, whose army had been raised to a force of forty thousand 
Englishmen and twenty thousand Portuguese, profited by the 
withdi'awal to throw off his system of defense and to assume an 
attitude of attack. Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz were taken by 
storm during the spring of 1812 ; and three days before Napoleon 
crossed the Niemen (June 24) in his march on Moscow, Welling- 
ton crossed the Agueda in a march on Salamanca. After a series 
of masterly movements on both sides, Marmont with the French 
army of the North attacked the English on the hills in the neigh- 
borhood of that town (July 22). While marching round the right 
of the English position, the French left wing was left isolated ; 
and with a sudden exclamation of " Marmont is lost !" Welling- 
ton flung on it the bulk of his force, crushed it, and drove the 
whole army from the field. The loss on either side was nearly 
equal, but failure had demoralized the French army; and its re- 
treat forced Joseph to leave Madrid, and Soult to evacuate An- 
dalusia and to concentrate the Southern army on the eastern coast. 
While Napoleon was still jDushing slowly over the vast j^lains of 
Poland, Wellington made his entry into Madrid in August, and 
began the siege of Burgos. The town, however, held out gallantly 
for a month, till i^e advance of the two French armies, now con- 
centrated in the North and South of Spain, forced Wellington (Oc- 
tober 18) to a hasty retreat on the Portuguese frontier. A day 
later (October 19) began the more fatal retreat of the Grand Army 
from Moscow. Victorious in the battle of Borodino, Napoleon 
had entered the older capital of Russia in triumph, and waited im- 
patiently to receive proposals of peace from the Czar, Avhen a fire 
kindled by its own inhabitants reduced the city to ashes. Th,e 
French army was forced to fall back amid the horrors of a Rus- 
sian winter. Of the four hundred thousand combatants who 
formed the Grand Army at its first outset, only a few thousand 
recrossed the Niemen in December. 

Gallantly as Napoleon was still to struggle against the foes who 
sprang up around him, his ruin became certain from the hour when 
he fell back from Moscow. But a new English Ministry reap#i 
the glory of success in the long struggle with his ambition, A 
return of the King's madness had made it necessary, in the begin- 
ning of 1811, to confer the Regency by Act of Parliament on the 
Prince of Wales; and the Whig sympathies of the Prince threat- 
ened the Perceval Cabinet with dismissal. The insecurity of their 
position told on the conduct of the war; for much of Wellington's 
apparent inactivity during 1811 was really due to the hesitation 
and timidity of the Ministers at home. In March, 1812, the assas- 
sination of Perceval by a maniac named Bellingham brought about 
the fall of his Ministry and fresh efforts to install the Whigs in 
office. But the attempt was as fruitless as ever, and the old Min- 
istry was restored under the guidance of the Earl of Liverpool, a 
man of no great abilities, but temperate, well-informed, and en- 
dowed with a singular gift of holding discordant colleagues to- 
gether. But the death of Perceval marks more than a mere change 
of Ministry. From, that moment the development of English life, 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



789 



which had been roughly arrested in 1792 by the reaction against 
the French Revolution, began again to take its natural course. 
The anti-revolutionary terror which Burke^did so much to rouse 
had spent most of its force by the time oi the Peace of Amiens; 
and though the country was unanimous in the after-struggle against 
the ambition of Bonaparte, the social disti'ess which followed on 
the renewal of the war revived questions of internal reform which 
had been set aside ever since the outbreak of the French Revolu- 
tion as Jacobinical. The natural relation of trade and commerce 
to the general wealth of the people at large was disturbed by the 
peculiar circumstances of the time. The war enriched the land- 
owner, the capitalist, the manufacturer, the farmer; but it impov- 
erished the poor. It is indeeji. from the fatal years which lie be- 
tween the Peace of Amiens and Waterloo that we must date that 
war of classes, that social severance between rich and poor, be- 
tween employers and employed, which still forms the great diffi- 
culty of English politics. 

The increase of wealth was indeed enormous. England was 
sole mistress of the seas. The war had given her possession of 
the colonies of Spain, of Holland, and of France ; and if lier trade 
was checked for a time by the Berlin decrees, the efforts of Napo- 
leon were soon rendered fruitless by the vast smuggling system 
which had sprung up along the coast of N'orth Germany. In spite 
of the far more serious blow which commerce received from the 
quarrel with America, English exports nearly doubled in the last 
fifteen years of the war. Manufactures profited by the great dis- 
coveries of Watt and Arkwright ; and the consumption of raw cot- 
ton in the mills of Lancashire rose during the same period from 
fifty to a hundred millions of pounds, Tlie vast accumulation of 
capital, as well as the constant recurrence of bad seasons at this 
ti;me, told upon the land, and forced agriculture into a feverish 
and unhealthy prosperity. Wheat rose to famine prices, and the 
value of land rose in proportion with the price of wheat. Inclo- 
sures Avent on with prodigious rapidity; the income of every land- 
owner was doubled, while the farmers were able to introduce im- 
provements into the processes of agriculture which changed the 
whole face of the country. But if the increase of wealth was 
enormous, its distribution was partial. During the fifteen years 
which preceded Waterloo, the number of the population rose from 
ten to thirteen millions, and this rapid increase kept down the 
rate of wages, which would naturally have advanced in a corre- 
sponding degree with the increase in the national wealth. Even 
manufactures, though destined in the long run to benefit the la- 
boring classes, seemed at first rather to depress them. One of 
the earliest results of the introduction of machinery was the ruin 
of a number of small trades which were carried on at home, and 
the pauperization of families who relied on them for support. In 
the winter of 1811 the terrible jjressure of this transition from 
handicraft to machinery was seen in the Luddite, or machine- 
breaking, riots which broke out over the Northern and Midland 
counties, and which were only suppressed by military force. 



(90 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



While labor was thus thrown out of its older grooves, and the 
rate of wages kept down at an artificially low figure by the rap- 
id increase of population, the rise in the price of wheat, which 
brought wealth to the landowner and the farmer, brought famine 
and death to the poor, for England was cut ofi" by the war from 
the vast corn-fields of the Continent or of America, which nowa- 
days redress from their abundance the results of a bad harvest. 
Scarcity was followed by a terrible pauperization of the laboring- 
classes. The amount of the poor-rate rose fifty per cent.; and 
with the increase of poverty followed its inevitable result, the in- 
crease of crime. 

The sense both of national glory and of national sufi*ering told, 
however feebly, on the course of j^olitics at home. Under the 
Perceval Ministry a blind opposition had been ofiered by the 
Government to every project of change or reform; but the ter- 
ror-struck reaction against the French Revolution which this op- 
positipn strove to perpetuate was even then passing away. The 
publication of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 by a knot of young 
lawyers at Edinburgh (Brougham, JeflTrey, Horner, and Mackin- 
tosh) marked the revival of the policy of constitutional and ad- 
ministrative progress which had been reluctantly abandoned by 
William Pitt. Jeremy Bentham gave a new vigor to political 
speculation by his advocacy of the doctrine of IJtility, and his 
definition of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" as 
the aim of political action. In 1809 Sir Francis Burdett revived 
the question of Parliamentary Reform. Only fifteen members 
supported his motion ; and a reference to the House of Commons, 
in a pamphlet which he subsequently published, as " a part of our 
fellow-subjects collected together by means which it is not neces-' 
sary to describe," was met by his committal to the Tower, where 
he remained till the prorogation of the Parliament. A far great- 
er efiect was produced by the perseverance with which Canning 
pressed year by year the question of Catholic Emancijsation. So 
long as Perceval lived both elForts at Reform were equally vain ; 
but on the accession of Lord Liverpool to power the advancing 
strength of a more liberal sentiment in the nation was felt by the 
policy of "moderate concession" which was adopted by the new 
Ministry, Catholic Emancipation became an open question in the 
Cabinet itself, and was adopted in 1812 by a triumphant majority 
in the House of Commons, though still rejected by the Lords. 

From this moment, however, all questions of home politics were 
again throw^n into the background by the absorbing interest of 
the war. In spite of the gigantic efforts which Napoleon made 
to repair the loss of the Grand Army, the spell which he had cast 
over Europe was broken by the retreat from Moscow. Prussia 
rose against him as the Russian army advanced across the Niemen, 
and the French were at once thrown back on the Elbe. In May, 
1813, Wellington again left Portugal with an army which had 
now risen to ninety thousand men; and overtaking the French 
forces in retreat at Vittoria inflicted pn them a defeat (June 21) 
which drove them in utter rout across the Pyrenees. Madrid 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



791 



was at once evacuated ; and Clauzel fell back from Zaragoza into 
France. The victory not only freed Spain from its invaders — it 
restored the spirit of the Allies at the darkest hour of their new 
fortunes. The genius of Napoleon rose to its height in his last 
campaigns. With a fresh army of two hundred thousand men 
whom he had gathered at Mainz he marched on the allied armies 
of Russia and Prussia in May, cleared Saxony by a victory over 
them at Lutzen, and threw them back on the Oder by a fresh vic- 
tory at Bautzen. Disheartened by defeat, and by the neutral at- 
titude which Austria still preserved, the two powers consented in 
June to an armistice, and negotiated for peace ; but the loss of 
Spain and Wellington's advance on the Pyrenees gave a new 
vigor to their counsels. The close of the armistice was followed 
by the union of Austria with the Allied Powers ; and a terrible 
overthrow of Napoleon at Leipzig in October forced the French 
army to cross the Rhine. Meanwhile the sieges of San Sebastian 
and of Pampeluna, with the obstinate defense of Marshal Soult 
in the Pyrenees, held Wellington for a time at bay; and it was 
only in October that a victory on the Bidassoa enabled him to 
enter France and to force Soult from his intrenched camp before 
Bayonne. But the war was now hurrying to its close. On the 
last day of 1813 the allies crossed the Rhine, and in a month a 
third of France had passed without opposition into their hands. 
Soult, again defeated by Wellington at Orthez, fell back on Tou- 
louse ; and Bordeaux, then left uncovered, hardly waited the ai'- 
rival of the English forces to hoist the white flag of the Bourbons. 
On the 10th of AjDril, 1814, Wellington again attacked Soult at 
Toulouse in an obstinate and indecisive engagement ; but though 
neither general knew it, the war was at that moment at an end. 
The wonderful struggle which Napoleon with a handful of men 
had maintained for two months against the overwhelming forces 
of the Allies closed with the surrender of Paris on the 31st of 
March ; and the submission of the capital v/as at once followed 
by the abdication of the Emperor and the return of the Bourbons. 
England's triumph over its great enemy was dashed by the 
more doubtful fortunes of the struggle which Napoleon had kin- 
dled across the Atlantic. The declaration of war by America in 
June, 1812, seemed an act of sheer madness. The American navy 
consisted of a few frigates and slooj^s ; its army was a mass of 
half-drilled and half-armed recruits ; the States themselves Avere 
divided on the question of the war; and Connecticut, with Massa- 
chusetts, refused to send either money or men. Three attempts 
to penetrate into Canada during the summer and autumn were 
repulsed with heavy loss. But these failures were more than re- 
deemed by unexpected successes at sea. In two successive en- 
gagements between English and American frigates, the former 
were forped to strike their flag. The efiect of these victories was 
out of all proportion to their real importance ; for they were tlie 
first heavy blows which had been dealt at England's supremacy 
over the seas. In 1813 America followed up its naval triunijihs 
by more vigorous efibrts on land. Its forces cleared Lake Ontario, 



792 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



captured Toronto, destroyed the Britisli flotilla on Lake Erie, and 
made themselves masters of Upper Canada. An attack on Lower 
Canada, however, was successfully beaten back ; and a fresh ad- 
vance of the British and Canadian forces in the heart of the win- 
ter again recovered the Upper Province. The reverse gave fresh 
strength to the party in the United States which had throughout 
been opposed to the war, and whose opposition to it had been im- 
bittered by the terrible distress brought about by the blockade 
and the ruin of American commerce. Cries of secession began to 
be heard, and Massachusetts took the bold step of appointing dele- 
gates to confer with delegates from the other New England States 
" on the subject of their grievances and common concerns." In 
1814, however, the war was renewed with more vigor than ever. 
Upper Canada was again invaded, but the American army, after 
inflicting a severe defeat on the British forces in the battle of 
Chippewa in July, was itself defeated a few weeks after in an 
equally stubborn engagement, and thrown back on its own front- 
ier. The fall of Napoleon now enabled the English Government 
to devote its whole strength to the struggle with an enemy which 
it had at last ceased to despise. General Ross, with a force of 
four thousand men, appeared in the Potomac, captured Washing- 
ton, and, before evacuating the city, burned its public buildings to 
the ground. Few more shameful acts are recorded in our history ; 
and it was the more shameful in that it was done under strict 
orders from the Government at home. The raid upon Washing- 
ton, however, was intended simply to strike terror into the Ameri- 
can people ; and the real stress of the war was thrown on two ex- 
peditions whose business was to penetrate into the States from 
the North and from the South. Both proved utter failures. A' 
force of nine thousand Peninsular veterans which marched in 
September to the attack of Plattsburg, on Lake Champlain, was 
forced to fall back by the defeat of the English flotilla which ac- 
companied it. A second force under General Packenhara appear- 
ed in December at the mouth of the Mississippi and attacked New 
Orleans, but was repulsed by General Jackson with the loss of 
half its numbers. Peace, however, had already been concluded. 
The close of the French Avar removed the causes of the struggle, 
and the claims, whether of the English or of the Americans, were 
set aside in silence in the new treaty of 1814. 

The close of the war with America freed England's hands at a 
moment when the reappearance of Napoleon at Paris called her 
to a new and final struggle with France. By treaty Avith the Al- 
lied Powers Napoleon had been suffered to retain a fragment of 
his former empire — the island of Elba, off" the coast of Tuscany ; 
and from Elba he had looked on at the quarrels Avhich sprang up 
betAveen his conquerors as soon as they gathered at Vienna to 
complete the settlement of Europe. The most formidable of these 
quarrels arose from the claim of Prussia to annex Saxony, and that 
of Russia to annex Poland ; but their union for this purpose was 
met by a counter-league of England and Austria Avith their old 
enemy, France, Avhose embassador, Talleyrand, labored vigorously 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



i93 



to bring the question to an issue by force of arms. At the mo- 
ment, however, when a war between the two leagues seemed close 
at hand, Napoleon quitted Elba, landed on the 1st of March, 1815, 
on the coast near Cannes, and, followed only by a thousand of his 
guards, marched over the mountains of Dauphine upon Grenoble 
and Lyons. He counted, and counted justly, on the indifference 
of the country to its new Bourbon rulers, on the longing of the 
army for a fresh struggle which should restore its glory, and 
above all in the spell of his name over soldiers whom he had so 
often led to victory. In twenty days from his landing he reach- 
ed the Tuileries unopposed, while Lewis the Eighteenth fled help- 
lessly to Ghent. But whatever hopes he had drawn from the di- 
visions of the Allied Powers were at once dispelled by their reso- 
lute action on the news of his descent upon France. Their strife 
was hushed, and their old union restored by the consciousness of 
a common danger.- A Declaration adopted instantly by all put 
Napoleon to the ban of Europe. " In breaking the convention 
which had established him in the island of Elba, Bonaparte has 
destroyed the sole legal title to which his political existence is at- 
tached. By reajjpearing in France with pi'ojects of trouble and 
overthrow he has not less deprived himself of the protection of 
the laws, and made it evident in the face of the universe that 
there can no longer be either peace or truce with him. The Pow- 
ers, therefore, declare that Bonaparte has placed himself out of 
the pale of civil and social relations, and that as the general ene- 
my and disturber of the world he is abandoned to public justice." 
An engagement to supply a million of men for the purposes of the 
Avar, and a recall of their armies to the Rhine, gave practical eflect 
to the words of the allies. England furnished subsidies to the 
amount of eleven millions to support these enormous hosts, and 
hastened to place an army on the frontier of the Netherlands. 
The best troops of the force which had been employed in the 
Peninsula, however, were still across the Atlantic; and of the 
eighty thousand men who gathered around Wellington only about 
a half were Englishmen, the rest principally raw levies from Bel- 
gium and Hanover. The Duke's plan was to unite with the one 
hundred and fifty thousand Prussians under Marshal Blucher who 
were advancing on the lower Rhine, and to enter France by Mons 
and Namur while the forces of Austria and Russia closed in upon 
Paris by way of Beltfort and Elsass, 

But Napoleon had thrown aside all thought of a merely defen- 
sive war. By amazing efforts he had raised an army of two hun- 
dred and fifty thousand men in the few months since his arrival 
in Paris ; and in the opening of June one hundred and twenty 
thousand Frenchmen were concentrated on the Sambre at Charle- 
roi, while Wellington's troops still lay in cantonments on the line 
of the Scheldt from Ath to Nivelles, and Blucher's on that of the 
Meuse from Nivelles to Liege. Both the allied armies hastened 
to unite at Quatre Bras; but their junction was already impossi- 
ble. Blucher, with eighty thousand men, was himself attacked 
on the 16th by Napoleon at Ligny, and after a desperate contest 



V94 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



driven back with terrible loss upon "Wavre. On the same day 
Ney with twenty thousand men, and an equal force under D'Erlon 
in reserve, appeared before Quatre Bras, where as yet only ten 
thousand English and the same force of Belgian troops had been 
able to assemble. The Belgians broke before the charges of the 
French horse; but the dogged resistance of the English infantry 
gave time for Wellington to bring uj) corps after corps, till at the 
close of the day Ney saw himself heavilj'- outnumbered, and with- 
drew baffled from the field. About five thousand men had fallen 
on either side in this fierce engagement ; but heavy as was Wel- 
lington's loss, the firmness of the English army had already done 
much to foil Napoleon's effort at breaking through the line of the 
allies. Blucher's retreat, however, left the English flank uncover- 
ed ; and on the following day, while the Prussians were falling 
back on Wavre, Wellington with nearly seventy thousand men — 
for his army was now well in hand — withdrew in good order upon 
Waterloo, followed by the mass of the French forces under the 
Emperor himself Napoleon had detached Marshal Grouchy with 
thirty thousand men to hang upon the rear of the beaten Prus- 
sians, while with a force of eighty thousand men he resolved to 
bring Wellington to battle. On the morning of the 18th of June 
the two armies faced one another on the field of Waterloo in front 
of the forest of Soignies, on the high-road to Brussels. Napoleon's 
one fear had been that of a continued retreat. "I have them!" 
he cried, as he saw the English line drawn up on a low rise of 
ground which stretched across the high-road from the chateau of 
Hougomont on its right to the farm and straggling village of La 
Haye Sainte on its left. He had some grounds for his confidence of 
success. On either side the forces numbered between seventy and 
eighty thousand men; but the French were superior in guns and 
cavalry, and a large part of Wellington's force consisted of Belgian 
levies, who broke and fled at the outset of the fight. A fierce at- 
tack upon Hougomont oi^ened the battle at eleven ; but it was not 
till midday that the corps of D'Erlon advanced upon the centre 
near La Haye Sainte, which from that time bore the main brunt 
of the struggle. Never has greater courage, whether of attack or 
endurance, been shown on any field than was shown by both com- 
batants at Waterloo. The columns of D'Erlon, repulsed by the 
English foot, were hurled back in disorder by a charge of the Scots 
Greys ; but the victorious horsemen were crushed in their turn by 
the French cuirassiers, and the mass of the French cavalry, twelve 
thousand strong, flung itself in charge after charge on the English 
front, carrying the English guns, and sweeping with desperate 
bravery round the unbroken squares whose fire thinned their ranks. 
With almost equal bravery the French columns of the centre again 
advanced, wrested at last the farm of La Haye Sainte from their 
opponents, and pushed on vigorously, though in vain, under Ney 
against the troops in its rear. Terrible as was the English loss — 
and many of his regiments Avere reduced to a mere handful of men 
— Wellington stubbornly held his ground ; while the Prussians, ad- 
vancing as they promised from Wavre through deep and miry 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



795 



forest roads, were slowly gathering to his support, disregarding 
the attack on their rear by which Grouchy strove to hold them 
back from the field. At half-past four their advanced guard de- 
ployed at last from the woods; but the main body was still far 
behind, and Napoleon was still able to hold his ground against 
them till their increasing masses forced him to stake all on a des- 
perate effort against the English front. The Imperial Guard — his 
only reserve, and which had as yet taken no part in the battle — 
was drawn up at seven in two huge columns of attack. The first, 
with Ney himself at its head, swept all before it as it mounted the 
rise beside La Haye Sainte, on which the thin English line still held 
its ground, and all but touched the English front when its mass, 
torn by the terrible fire of musketry with which it was received, 
gave way before a charge from the English Guards. The second, 
three thousand strong, advanced with the same courage over the 
slope near Plougomont, only to be shattered and repulsed in the 
same way. At the moment when these masses, shattered but still 
unconquered, fell slowly and doggedly back down the fatal rise, 
the Prussians pushed forward some forty thousand strong on Na- 
poleon's right, their guns swept the road to Charleroi, and Wel- 
lington seized the moment for a general advance. From that mo- 
ment all was lost. Only the Old Guard stood firm in the wreck 
of the French army; and nothing but night and exhaustion check- 
ed the English in their pursuit of the broken masses who hurried 
from the field. The Prussian horse continued the chase through 
the night, and only forty thousand Frenchmen, with some thirty 
guns, recrossed the Sambre. Napoleon himself fled hurriedly to 
Paris, and his second abdication was followed by the triumphant 
entry of the English and Prussian armies into the French capital. 



Seo. IV. 
Tub War 

WITH 

Fbakof. 
1815. 



V96 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



EPILOGUE. 

With the victory of Waterloo we reach a time within the 
memory of some now living, and the opening of a period of our 
history, the greatest indeed of all in real importance and interest, 
but perhaps too near to us as yet to admit of a cool and purely 
historical treatment. In a work such as the present, at any rate, 
it will be advisable to limit ourselves from this point to a brief 
summary of the more noteworthy events which have occurred in 
our political history since 1815. 

The peace which closed the great war with Napoleon left Brit- 
ain feverish and exhausted. Of her conquests at sea she retained 
only Malta (whose former possessors, the Knights of St. John, had 
ceased to exist), the Dutch colonies of Ceylon and the Cape of Good 
Hope, the French colony of Mauritius, and a few West India isl- 
ands. On the other hand, the pressure of the heavy taxation and 
of the debt, which now reached eight hundred millions, was im- 
bittered by the general distress of the country. The rapid devel- 
opment of English industry for a time ran ahead of the world's 
demands ; the markets at home and abroad were glutted Avith 
unsalable goods, and mills and manufactories were brought to a 
standstill. The scarcity caused by a series of bad harvests was 
intensified by the selfish legislation of the landowners in Parlia-' 
ment. Conscious that the prosperity of English agriculture was 
merely factitious, and rested on the high price of corn produced 
by the war, they prohibited by an Act passed in 1815 the intro- 
duction of foreign corn till wheat had reached famine prices. So- 
ciety, too, was disturbed by the great changes of employment con- 
sequent on a sudden return to peace after twenty years of war, and 
by the disbanding of the immense forces employed at sea and on 
land. The movement against machinery, which had been j)ut down 
in 1812, revived in the formidable riots of the Luddites, and the 
distress of the rural poor brought about a rapid increase of crime. 
The steady opposition too of the Administration, in which Lord 
Castlereagh's influence was now supreme, to any project of polit- 
ical progress created a dangerous irritation which brought to the 
front men whose demand of a " radical reform " in English insti- 
tutions won them the name of Radicals, and di-ove more violent 
agitators into treasonable disaffection and silly plots. In 1819 
the breaking up by military force of a meeting at Manchester, as- 
sembled for the purpose of advocating a reform in Parliament, in- 
creased the unpopularity of the Government; and a plot of some 
desperate men, with Arthur Thistlewood at their head, for the as- 
sassination of the whole Ministry, which is known as the Cato 
Street Conspiracy (1820), threw light on the violent temper Avhich 
was springing up among its more extreme opponents. The death 



EPILOGUE. 



191 



of George the Third in 1820, and the accession of his son the Prince 
Regent as George the Fourth, only added to the general disturb- 
ance of men's minds. The new King had long since forsaken his 
wife and privately charged her with infidelity; his .first act on 
mounting the throne was to renew his accusations against hei", and 
to lay before Parliament a bill for the dissolution of her marriage 
with him. The public agitation which followed on this step at 
last forced the Ministry to abandon the bill, but the shame of the 
royal family and the unpopularity of the King increased the gen- 
eral discontent of the country. 

The real danger to public order, however, lay only in the blind 
opposition to all political change which confused wise and moder- 
ate projects of reform with projects of revolution; and in 1822 the 
suicide of Lord Castlereagh, who had now become Marquis of Lon- 
donderry, and, to whom this opposition was mainly due, put an 
end to the policy of mere resistance. Canning became Foreign 
Secretary in Castlereagh's place, and with Canning returned the 
earlier and progressive policy of William Pitt. Abroad, his first 
act was to break with the "Holy Alliance," as it called itself, 
which the Continental courts had formed after the overthrow of 
Napoleon for the repression of revolutionary or liberal movements 
in their kingdoms, and whose despotic policy had driven Naples, 
Spain, and Portugal in 1820 into revolt. Canning asserted the 
principle of non-interference in the internal afiairs offoreign states, 
a principle he enforced by sending troops in 1826 to defend Port- 
ugal from Spanish intervention, while he recognized the revolted 
colonies of Spain in South America and Mexico as independent 
states. At home his influence was seen in the new strength gain-, 
ed by the qiiestion of Catholic Emancipation, and in the passing 
of a bill for giving relief to Roman Catholics through the House 
of Commons in 1825. With the entry of his friend, Mr, Huskisson, 
into ofiice in 1823 began a commercial policy which was founded 
on a conviction of the benefits derived from freedom of trade, and 
which brought about at a later time the repeal of the Corn Laws. 
The new drift of public policy produced a division among the Min- 
isters which showed itself openly at Lord Liverpool's death in 
182 7. Canning became First Lord of the Treasury, but the Duke 
of Wellington, with the Chancellor, Lord Eldon, and the Home 
Secretary, Mr. Peel, refused to serve under him; and four months 
after the formation of Canning's Ministry it was broken up by his 
death. A temporary Ministry formed under Lord Goderich on Can- 
ning's principles was at once weakened by the position offoreign af- 
fairs. A revolt of the Greeks against Turkey had now lasted some 
years in spite of Canning's efibrts to bring about peace, and the 
dispatch of an Egyptian expedition with orders to devastate the 
Morea and carry ofi" its inhabitants as slaves forced England, 
France, and Russia to interfere. In 1827 their united fleet under 
Admiral Codrington attacked and destroyed that of Egypt in the 
bay of Navarino; but the blow at Turkey was disapproved by 
English opinion, and the Ministry, already Avanting in Parlia- 
mentary strength, was driven to resign (1828). 



798 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



The formation of a purely Tory Ministry by the Duke of Wel- 
lington, with Mr. Peel for its principal support in the Commons, 
was generally looked on as a promise of utter resistance to all 
further progress. But the state of Ireland, where a "Catholic 
Association " formed by Daniel O'Connell maintained a growing 
agitation, had now reached a point when the English Ministry had 
to choose between concession and civil war. The Duke gave way, 
and brought in a bill which, like that designed by Pitt, admitted 
Roman Catholics to Parliament, and to all but a few of the high- 
est posts, civil or military, in the service of the Crown. The pass- 
ing of this bill in 1829 by the aid of tlie AVhigs threw the Tory 
party into confusion ; while the cry for Parliamentary Reform was 
suddenly revived with a strength it had never known before by a 
Revolution in France in 1830, which drove Charles the Tenth from 
the throne and called his cousin, Louis Philippe, the Duke of Or- 
leans, to reign as a Constitutional King. William the Fourth, who 
succeeded to the crown on the death of liis brother, George the 
Fourth, at tliis moment (1830) was favorable to the demand of 
Reform, but Wellington refused all concession. The refusal drove 
him from office ; and for the first time in twenty years the Whigs 
saw themselves again in power under the leadership of Earl Grey. 
A bill for Parliamentary Reform, which took away the right of 
representation from fifty-six decayed or rotten boroughs, gave the 
143 members they returned to counties or large towns which as 
yet sent no members to Parliament, established a £10 household- 
er qualification for voters in boroughs, and extended the county 
franchise to leaseholders and copy-holders, was laid before Parlia- 
ment in 1831. On its defeat the Ministry appealed to the countrj". 
The new House of Commons at once passed the bill, and so terri- 
ble was the agitation produced by its rejection by the Lords, that 
on its subsequent reintroduction the Peers who opposed it with- 
drew and suffered it to become law (June 7, 1832). The Reform- 
ed Parliament which met in 1833 did much by the violence and 
inexperience of many of its new members, and especially by the 
conduct of O'Connell, to produce a feeling of reaction in the coun- 
try. On the resignation of Lord Grey in 1834 the Ministry was 
reconstituted under the leadership of Viscount Melbourne ; and 
though this administration was soon dismissed by the King, 
whose sympathies had now veered round to the Tories, and suc- 
ceeded for a short time by a Ministry under Sir Robert Peel (No- 
vember, 1834 — April, 1835), a general election again returned a 
Whig Parliament, and replaced Lord Melbourne in office. Weak- 
ened as it was by the growing change of political feeling through- 
out the country, no Ministiy has ever wrought greater and more 
beneficial changes than the Whig Ministry under Lord Grey and 
Lord Melbourne during its ten years of rule from 1831 to 1841. 
In 1833 the system of slavery which still existed in the British 
colonies, though the Slave-trade was suppressed, was abolished at 
a cost of twenty millions ; the commercial monopoly of the East 
India Company Avas abolished, and the trade to the East thrown 
open to all merchants. In 1834 the growing evil of pauperism was 



EPILOGUE. 



799 



checked by the enactment of a I'Tew Poor Law. In 1835 the Mu- 
nicipal Corporations Act restored to the inhabitants of towns those 
rights of self-government of which they had been deprived since 
the fourteenth century. 1836 saw the passing of the General Reg- 
istration Act, while the constant quarrels over tithe were reme- 
died by the Act for Tithe Commutation, and one of the grievances 
of Dissenters redressed by a measure which allowed civil mar- 
riage. A system of national education, begun in 1834 by a small 
annual grant toward the erection of schools, was developed in 
1839 by the creation of a Committee of the Privy Council for ed- 
ucational purposes and by the steady increase of educational 
grants. 

Great, however, as these measures were, the difficulties of the 
Whig Ministry grew steadily year by year. Ireland, where O'Con- 
nell maintained an incessant agitation for the Repeal of the Union, 
could only be held down by Coercion Acts. In spite of the impulse 
given to trade by the system of steam communication which be- 
gan with the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway 
in 1830, the country still suffered from distress; and the discon- 
tent of the poorer classes gave rise in 1839 to riotous demands 
for " the People's Charter," including universal suffrage, vote by 
ballot, annual Parliaments, equal electoral districts, the abolition 
of all property qualification for members, and payment for their 
services. In Canada a quarrel between the two districts of Upper 
and Lower Canada was suffered through mismanagement to grow 
into a formidable revolt. The vigorous but meddlesome way in 
which Lord Palmerston, a disciple of Canning, carried out that 
statesman's foreign policy, supporting Donna Maria as sovei'eign 
in Poi'tugal and Isabella as Queen in Spain against claimants of 
more absolutist tendencies by a Quadruple Alliance with France 
and the two countries of the Peninsula, and forcing Mehemet Ali, 
the Pacha of Egypt, to withdraw from an attack on Turkey by the 
bombardment of Acre in 1840, created general uneasiness; while 
the public conscience was wounded by a war with China in 1839, 
on its refusal to allow the smuggling of opium into its dominions, 
A more terrible blow was given to the Ministry by events in In- 
dia; where the occupation of Cabul in 1839 ended two years later 
in a general revolt of the Affghans and in the loss of a British array 
in the Khyber Pass. The strength of the Government was restored 
for a time by the death of William the Fourth in 1837, and the 
accession of Victoria, the daughter of his brother Edward, Duke 
of Kent, With the accession of Queen Victoria ended the union of 
England and Hanover nnder the same sovereigns, the latter state 
passing to the next male heir, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, But 
the Whig hold on the House of Commons passed steadily away, and 
a general election in 1841 gave their opponents, who now took the 
name of Conservatives, a majority of nearly a hundred members. 
The general confidence in Sir Robert Peel, who was placed at the 
head of the Ministry which followed that of Lord Melbourne, en- 
abled him to deal vigorously with two of the difficulties which 
had most hampered his predecessors. The disorder of the public 

5] 



800 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



finances was repaired by the repeal of a host of oppressive and nse- 
|, less duties and by the imposition of an Income Tax. In Ireland 
O'Connell was charged with sedition and convicted, and though 
subsequently released from prison on appeal to the House of 
Lords, his influence received a shock from which it never recov- 
ered. Peace was made with China by a treaty which threw open 
some of its ports to traders of all nations ; and in India the disas- 
ter of Cabul was avenged by an expedition under General Pollock 
which penetrated victoriously to the capital of that country in 
1842. The shock, however, to the English power brought about 
fresh struggles for supremacy with the natives, and especially 
with the Sikhs, who were crushed for the time in three great bat- 
tles, at Moodkee, Ferozeshah, and Sobraon (1845 and 1846), and 
the province of Scinde annexed to the British dominions. 

Successful as it proved itself abroad, the Conservative Govern- 
ment encountered unexpected difficulties at home. From the en- 
actment of the Corn Laws in 1815 a dispute had constantly gone 
on between those who advocated these and similar measures as 
a protection to native industry and those who, viewing them as 
simply laying a tax on the consumer for the benefit of the pro- 
ducer, claimed entire freedom of trade with the world. In 1839 
an Anti-Corn-Lavv League had been formed to enforce the views 
of the advocates of free trade ; and it was in gi'eat measure the 
alarm of the farmers and landowners at its action which had in- 
duced them to give so vigorous a support to Sir Robert Peel. 
But though Peel entered office pledged to protective measui'es, 
his own mind was slowly veering round to a conviction of their 
inexpediency ; and in 1846 the failure of the potato crop in Ireland 
and of the harvest in England forced him to introduce a bill for 
the repeal of the Corn Laws. The bill passed, but the resentment 
of his own party soon drove him from office ; and he was succeed- 
ed by a Whig Ministry under Lord John Russell which remained 
in power till 1852. The first work of this Ministry was to carry 
out the policy of free trade into every department of British com- 
merce ; and from that time to this the maxim of the League, to 
" buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest," has been 
accepted as the law of our commercial policy. Other events were 
few. The general overthrow of the Continental monarchs in the 
Revolution of 1848 found faint echoes in a feeble rising in Ireland 
under Smith O'Brien which was easily suppressed by a few police- 
men, and in a demonstration of the Chartists in London which 
passed ofi" without further disturbance. A fresh war with the 
Sikhs in 1848 was closed by the victory of Goojerat and the an- 
nexation of the Punjaub. 

The long peace which had been maintained between the Euro- 
pean powers since the treaties of 1815 was now drawing to a close. 
In 1852 the Ministry of Lord John Russell was displaced by a 
short return of the Conservatives to power under Lord Derby ; but 
a union of the Whigs with the Free-Trade followers of Sir Rob- 
ert Peel restored them to office in the beginning of 1853. Lord 
Aberdeen, the her.d of the new administration, was at once com- 



EPILOGUE. 



801 



pelled to resist the attempts of Russia to force on Turkey a hu- 
miliating treaty; and in 1854 England allied herself with Louis 
Napoleon, Avho had declared himself Emperor of the French, to 
resist the invasion of the Danubian Principalities by a Russian 
army. The army was withdrawn ; but in September the allied 
force landed on the shores of the Crimea, and after a victory at 
the river Alma undertook the siege of Sebastopol. The garrison, 
however, soon proved as strong as the besiegers, and as fresh Rus- 
sian forces reached tlie Crimea the Allies found themselves be- 
sieged in their turn. An attack on the English position at Inker- 
raann on November the 5th was repulsed with the aid of a French 
division ; but winter proved more terrible than the Russian sword, 
and the English force wasted away with cold or disease. The 
public indignation at its sufferings forced the Aberdeen Ministry 
from office in the opening of 1855 ; and Lord Palmerston became 
Premier with a Ministry which included those members of the last 
administration who were held to be most in earnest in the prose- 
cution of the war. After a siege of nearly a year, the Allies at last 
became masters of Sebastopol in September, and Russia, spent with 
the strife, consented in 1856 to the Peace of Paris. The military 
reputation of England had fallen low during the struggle, and to 
this cause the mutiny of the native troops in Bengal, which quick- 
ly followed in 1857, may partly be attributed. Russian intrigues, 
Moslem fanaticism, resentment at the annexation of the kingdom 
of Oude by Lord Dalhousie, and a fanatical belief on the part of 
the Hindoos that the English Government had resolved to make 
them Christians by forcing them to lose their caste, have all been 
assigned as causes of an outbreak which still remains mysterious. 
A mutiny at Meerut in May, 1857, was followed by the seizure of 
Delhi, where the native king was enthroned as Emperor ofHin- 
dostan, by a fresh mutiny and massacre of the Europeans at Cawn- 
pore, by the rising of Oude and the siege of the Residency at Luck- 
now. The number of English troops in India was small, and for 
the moment all Eastern and Central Hindostan seemed lost ; but 
Madras, Bombay, and the Punjaub remained untouched, and the 
English in Bengal and Oude not only held their ground, but march- 
ed upon Delhi, and in September took the town by storm. Two 
months later the arrival of reinforcements under Sir Colin Camp- 
bell relieved Lucknow, which had been saved till now by the he- 
roic advance of Sir Henry Havelock with a handful of troops, and 
cleared Oude of the mutineers. The suppression of the revolt was 
followed by a change in the government of India, which was trans- 
ferred in 1858 from the Company to the Crown; the Queen being 
formally proclaimed its sovereign, and the Governor-General be- 
coming her Viceroy. 

The credit which Lord Palmerston won during the struggle 
with Russia and the Sepoys was shaken by his conduct in propos- 
ing an alteration in the law respecting conspiracies, in 1858, in 
consequence of an attempt to assassinate Napoleon the Third, 
which Avas believed to have originated on English ground. The 
violent language of the French army brought about a movement 



802 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



for the enlistment of a volunteer force, which soon reached a hun- 
dred and fifty thousand men ; and so great was the irritation it 
caused that the bill, which was thought to have been introduced 
in deference to the demands of France, was rejected by the House 
of Commons. Lord Derby again became Prime Minister for a 
few months; but a fresh election in 1859 brought back Lord Pal- 
merston, whose Ministry lasted till his death in 1865. At home 
his policy was one of pure inaction ; and his whole energy was 
directed to the preservation of English neutrality in fiive great 
strifes which distracted not only Europe, but the New World : a 
war between France and Austria in 1859, which ended in the cre- 
ation of the kingdom of Italy; a civil war in America, which began 
with tlie secession of the Southern States in 1861, and ended four 
years later in their subjugation ; an insurrection of Poland in 1863 ; 
an attack of France upon Mexico, and of Austria and Prussia upon 
Denmark in 1864. The American war, by its interference Avith 
the supply of cotton, reduced Lancashire to distress; while the fit- 
ting out of piratical cruisers in English harbors in the name of the 
Southern Confederacy gave Amei'ica just grounds for an irrita- 
tion whicli was only allayed at a far later time. Peace, however, 
was successfully preserved; and the policy of non-intervention 
was pursued after Lord Palmerston's death by his successor. Lord 
Russell, who remained neutral during the brief but decisive con- 
flict between Prussia and Austria in 1866 which transferred to the 
former the headship of Germany. 

With Lord Palmerston, however, passed away the policy of po- 
litical inaction which had distinguished his rule. Lord Russell had 
long striven to bring about a further reform of Parliament ; and 
in 1866 he laid a bill for that purpose before the House of Com- 
mons, whose rejection was followed by the resignation of the Min- 
istry. Lord Derby, who again became Prime Minister, with Mr. 
Disraeli as leader of the House of Commons, found himself, how- 
ever, driven to introduce, in 1867, a Reform Bill of a far more sweep- 
ing character than that which had failed in Lord Russell's hands. 
By this measure, which passed in August, 1867, the borough fran- 
chise was extended to all rate-payers, as well as to lodgers occu- 
pying rooms of the annual value of £10; the county franchise was 
reduced to £12; thirty-three members were withdrawn from En- 
glish boroughs, twenty-five of whom were transferred to English 
counties, and the rest assigned to Scotland and Ireland. Large 
numbers of the working classes were thus added to the constitu- 
encies ; and the indirect efiect of this great measure was at once 
seen in the vigorous policy of the Parliament which assembled 
after the new elections in 1868. Mr. Disraeli, who had become 
Prime Minister on the withdrawal of Lord Derby, retired quietly 
on finding that a Liberal majority of over one hundred members 
had been returned to the House of Commons ; and his place was 
taken by Mr. Gladstone, at the head of a Ministry which for the 
first time included every section of the Liberal party. A succes- 
sion of great measures proved the strength and energy of the new 
administration. Its first work was with Ireland, whose chronic 






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ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



EPILOGUE. 



803 



discontent it endeavored to remove by the disestablishment and 
disendowment of the Protestant Church in 1869, and by a Land 
Bill which established a sort of tenant-right in every part of the 
country in 18V0. The claims of the Non-conformists were met in 
1868 by the abolition of compulsory church-rates, and in 1871 by 
the abolition of all religious tests for admission to offices or de- 
grees in the universities. Important reforms were undertaken in 
the management of the navy ; and a plan for the entire reorgani- 
zation of the army was carried into effect after the system of pro- 
motion to its command by purchase had been put an end to. In 
1870 the question of national education was' furthered by a bill 
which provided for the establishment of school boards in every 
district, and for their support by means of local rates. In 1871 a 
fresh step in Parliamentary reform was made by the passing of a 
measure which enabled the votes of electors to be given in se- 
cret by means of the ballot. The greatness and rapidity of these 
changes, however, produced so rapid a reaction in the minds of the 
constituencies that on the failure of his attempt to pass a bill for 
organizing the higher education of Ireland, Mr. Gladstone felt him- 
self forced, in 1874, to consult public opinion by a dissolution of 
Parliament ; and the return of a Conservative majority of near- 
ly seventy members was necessarily followed by his retirement 
from office, Mr. Disraeli again becoming First Minister of the 
Crown. 



EPILOGtJE. 



1815- 
1873. 



INDEX. 



Abbo of Pleury, in England, 88. 
Abbot, Archbishop, his intolerance, 
465. 
his iconoclasra, 501. 
Abelard, his lectures attended by 

Englishmen, 15T, 15S. 
Abercromby, General, his victory ; 

see Battles. 
Abhorrers ; see Petitioners and Ab- 

horrers. 
Acts of Parliament ; see Statutes. 
Acquitaine, loss of, 249. 
Acre, defense of; see Smith (Sir 

Sidney). 
Addiugton becomes Prime Minis- 
ter T79. 
Adelard, ofBath, 115. 
his services to the universities, 
15T. 
Adjutators, council of, 549. 
Alfred; see Alfred. 
^IfsjarjEarl of Mercia, exile of, 100. 
.Alfred, comes to the throne, 79. 
drives back the Danes, 79, 80. 
makes peace, 80. 
his objects, SO, 81. 
his government, 81, 82. 
his literary work, 82-84. 
sayings of, compiled in Henry 
the Second's time, 144. 
j3Slfred,EadmundIronside's broth- 
er, attacks England, 97. 
his eyes torn out by Harold, ib. 
^lla, a leader of the Jutes, 43. 

king of Deira, 54. 
..EtheTbald, of Mercia, 71, 72. 

his repulse from Wessex, 74. 
.lEthelberht, his rule in Kent, 54. 
his conversion, 55. 
effect of his death, 56. 
JSthelburh, wife of lui, 35. 
^thelflaed, Alfred's daughter, 
wife of^thelred, 81. 
Lady of Mercia, 85. 
conquers the five boroughs, ib. 
fortifies Tamworth and Stafi'ord, 
ib. 
^thelfrith, founds the kingdom 
of Northumbria, 52. 
massacres monks of Bangor, 52, 

53. 
effect of his victories, 53. 
eftect of his death, ib. 
.^Ethelred, king of Mercia, 70. 
.(Ethelred, son of ^thehvnlf, 79. 
makes the peace of Nottingham, 

ib. 
his death, ih. 
.lEthelred, Alfred's son-in-law, 81. 

his victories over Danes, 84. 
^thelred, the Unread}', buys peace 
from Danes, 91. 
orders massacre of St. Brice's 
Day, ib. 



.lEthelred driven from England to 

Normandy, 92. 
jEthelstau conquers West Wales, 
85. 
his victory at Brunauburh, ib. 
.^thelthryth. Lady, founds abbey 

of Ely, 67. 
.lEthelwold, his school at Abing- 
don, 88. 
bishop of Winchester, ib. 
.^thelwulf, king of Wessex, 78. 

struggle with Danes, ib. 
Agricola, Julius ; see Britain, Ro- 
man conquest of. 
AidaUj sent to Northumbria as a 
missionary, 58. 
his blessing on Oswald, 59. 
his miracle against Penda, 00. 
Cuthbert's vision of him, 01. 
effect of his work, 65. 
Aix-la-Chapelle, peace of, 715. 
Albemarle, Stephen of, insurrec- 
tion in his favor, 118. 
Albigenses, 171, 172. 
Alcwine, or Alcuin, as an authori- 
ty, 73. 
his assistance to Bseda, 74. 
averts war between Ofla and 
Charles, 76. 
Aldgate, surrendered by Cnihtena 

Guild, 123. 
Alexander the First of Russia allies 

himself with Napoleon, 783. 
Alfune builds St. Giles's in twelfth 

century, 123. 
Allen driven from Oxford by Eliz- 
abeth, 410. 
Alleyn, author of ' 'Alarm to the Un- 
converted," 610. 
his death, ib. 
Alliance, the Triple ; see Temple, 

Sir William. 
Alva, his appearance in Flanders, 
393. 
the revolt against, 414. 
America, discovery of, 315. 
(United States of), rise of, 726- 

728. 
attitude of George the Third to- 
ward, 740, 741 ; see also Mas- 
sachusetts, Virginia, Boston, 
Washington, 
congress of, in 1775, 742. 
Declaration of Independence,743. 
final recognition of its independ- 
ence, 748. 
effect of it, 749,750. 
alliance with Napoleon Bona- 
parte, 787, 791. 
civil war and its effects, 802. 
Amiens, raise of; see Lewis the 
Ninth, 
peace of, 779, 780. 
Anderida, sicije of, 4S. 



Andrewe?, Bishop, his declaration 

about James the First, 494. 
Andredswold, 47. 

Danish position there, 84. 
Anglesey conquered by Eadwinc, 

53. 
Anjou, the line of, its character, 

126, 127. 
Anne deserts her father, 660. 
influence on her of Duchess of 
Marlborough ; .9ee Marlbor- 
ough, Duchess of. 
recalled by William, 682. 
her accession and policy, ib. 
her assent to the Act' of Union 

witluScotland, 688. 
her Toryism, 689. 
Anselni becomes Prior of Bee, 
102. 
his works, 103. 
made Archbishop of Canterbury, 

118. 
his struggle against William Ru- 

fus, ib. 
his share in the marriage of Hen- 
ry, 119. 
his recall by Henry, ib. 
supports Henry against Robert, 

124. 
his effect on our literatuce, 143. 
Archery, English, Edward the 

First's use of it, 203. 
Architecture, impulse given to by 

the Jews, 115. 
Arcot, defense of, 722. 
Argyle, Earl of, his relations with 
Charles the First, 527. 
his struggle with Montrose, .542. 
his reception of Oliver Cromwell, 

564. 
his execution, 616. 
Argyle, Earl of, in James the Sec- 
ond's time, his condemnation, 
644. 
his insurrection, ib. 
his execution, ib. 
Arkwright, eflects of his invention 

of spinning-machine, 789. 
Arietta, William the Conqueror's 

mother, 104. 
Arlington, Lord, his dislike of 
France, 620. 
his part in the Triple Alliance, 

ib. 
his share in the Treaty of Dover, 

621. 
his advice about the Test Act, 
623. 
Armada, the Spanish, struggle with, 
419-421. 
a new one threatened by Philip, 
438. 
Armagh, University of, .58. 
Army plot to free Strafford, 525. 



806 



INDEX. 



Arnold, General, his attack on Can- 


Bangor, massacre of the monks of, 


l&tLti\es— continued.. 


ada, 743. 


52. 


Marengo, 772. 


Arthur, of Brittany, taken prisoner 


Bank of England ; see Montague. 


Marignano, 332. 


and murdered by John, 141. 


Bannockburn ; see Battles. 


Marston Moor, 537. 


Arthur, of England, "dreams of," 


Baptists, rise of, 544. 


Maserfeld, 59. 


a romance, 144. 


Barebones, Parliament, 566, 567. 


Minden, 723. 


his tomb ; see Glastonbury. 


Barlow made Bishop of St. David's, 


Mortemer, 105. 


romances about, 145. 


359. 


Mortimer's Cross, 297. 


Ascham, his view of the effect of 


Barouius, 469. 


Mount Badon; see Badon (Mount). 


Italian literature ou England, 


Barons, Greater and Lessei', 195. 


Naseby, 542. 


403. 


their power after the struggle 


Navarete, 249. 


Ascue, Anne, burned, 364. 


with Henry the Third, 221-223. 


Nechtansmere, 69. 


Ashley, Lord, opposes the Act of 


Barrow, his influence on Newton, 


Neville's Cross, 244. 


Uniformity, 606. 


597. 


Newbury, 536. 


defends Charles's proposal to 


Bartholomew's Day, St., in 1662, 


Newtown Butler, 605. 


dispense with it, C09. 


414 ; see also St. Bartholomew. 


Nile, the, 771. 


opposes the Five Mile Act, 619. 


Bastwick, the Puritan, 516. 


Northallerton, 130. 


his dislike of France, and sup- 


Battle Abbey, 109, 120. 


Orthez, 791. 


port of Protestantism, 620. 


Battles, Aboukir, 779. 


Otford, 75. 


his attitude toward Holland, 622 ; 


Aclea, 78. 


Otterburn, 385. 


see also Cooper, Shaftesbury. 


Agincourt, 281, 282. 


Parret, 78. 


Asser, the friend of Alfred, S2. 


Assandun, 94. 


Philiphaugh, 543. 


Assize of Clarendon ; see Clarendon. 


Assaye, 781. 


Pinkie Clough, 3SC. 


Assize of Arms, 137. 


Athenry, 442. 


Plassey, 723. 


Astley, Sir Jacob, -his view of the 


Ansterlitz, 782. 


Poitiers, 246, 247. 


battle of Stow, 543, 544. 


Aylesford, 46, 47. 


Preston Pans, 714. 


Atheluey, Alfred at, SO. 


Badou (Mount), 48, 


Quebec, 723, 725. 


Atterbury, Bishop of Rocbestev, 


Bannockburn, 231. 


(Juiberon, 723. 


his removal from his bishop- 


Barbury Hill, 51. 


Kamillies, 687. 


ric, 699. 


Barnet, 300. 


Rossbach, 720. 


Aubrey, his account of Hobbes, 


Bensington, 75. 


Salamanca, 783. 


600. 


Blenheim, 685. 


Saratoga, 744. 


Augsburg, peace of, 662. 


Borodino, 788. 


Secandun, 72. 


Augustine, mission of, 54. 


Bouvines. 151. 


Sedgemoor, 645. 


lands in Kent, ib. 


Boyne, 669, 6i0. 


Senlac, 108, 109. 


his work, 55. 


Bradford, 68. 


Sheriffmnir, 09T. 




Brunanburh, 85. 


Shrewsbury, 279. 


Bacon, Roger, studied under rab- 


Bunker's Hill, 742. 


Solway Moor, 386. 


bis, 116, 161. 


Burford, 72. 


Somerton, 71. 


his story, 162. 


Buttington,S4. 


St. Albans, 296, 297. 


his "Opus Maju?," 164. 


Camperdown, 771. 


Stamford Bridge, 108. 


his death and subsequent fame, 


■ Chalgrove, 535. 


Stirling, 211. 


165. 


Charford, 48. 


Stow, 543. 


■why allowed books, 174. 


Charmouth, 78. 


St. Vincent, 748, 771. 


his rank as a school-man, i&. 


Chester, 53, 185. 


Talavera, 785. 


Bacon, Francis, his view of the fri- 


Chippewa, 792. 


Tenchebray, 124. 


ars, 174. 


Conquereux, 128. 


Torres Vedras, 786. 


a type of the new literature, 409, 


Copenhagen, 779. 


Toulon, 769. 


422. 


Corunna, 784. 


Toulouse, 791. 


his opinion of the Brownists, 


Cressv, 243, 244. 


Towton, 298. 


544. 


Culloden, 714, 715. 


Trafalgar, 781, 782. 


asserts that the Brownists are 


Deorham, 51, 185. 


Val-6s-dunes, 104. 


"suppressed and worn out," ib. 


Dettingen, 712. 


Varaville, 106. 


his career, 591, 595. 


Dunbar, 559, 560. 


Vimiera, 784. 


Badbie, John, burned as a heretic, 


Edgehill, 533. 


Vinegar Hill, 771. 


279. 


Edington, 80. 


Vittoria, 790. 


Bffida, his story of the Frisian 


Ellandun, 77. 


Wagram, 785. 


slave-dealer, 50. 


Evesham, 181. 


Wakefield, 297, 


effect of his Latin History, 55. 


Falkirk, 212. 


"Wareham, 80. 


his story of the sparrow, 56. 


Fleurus, 769. 


Waterloo, 794, 795. 


its significance, 63. 


Flodden, 385. 


Winwoed, 60. 


his career, 72-74. 


Fontenoy, 713. 


Worcester, 561. 


account of his Ecclesiastical His- 


Fuentes de Onore, 788. 


Baxter, Richard, his estimate of 


tory, 73, 74. 


Halidon Hill, 234. 


Cromwell's church appoint- 


his death, 74. 


Hastings ; see Senlac. 


ments, 573. 


his letter to Archbishop Ecg- 


Hatfield, 57. 


his attitude toward Richard 


berht, ib. 


Heaven's Field, ib. 


Cromwell, 579, 580. 


his History translated by .iElfred, 


Hengestesdun,78. 


his reputation as a controversial- 


83. 


Homildon Hill, 385. 


ist, 607. 


rediscovered by Layamon, 147. 


Inverlochy, 542. 


his account of the merciless ex- 


Bagdad, knowledge brought from. 


Jemappes, 767. 


pulsion of the Non-conformist 


157. 


Jena, 782. 


clergy, 609. 


Ball, John, 255, 265, 266. 


June 21st, 771. 


his opposition to the Declaration 


Balliol, John, 208-210. 


Killiecrankie, 663. 


of Indulgence, 050. 


Edward, 232, 234. 


Kilsyth, 543. 


Bayeux, Norse language remains 


Baltimore, Lord, colonizes Mary- 


La Hogne, 672. 


at. 101. 


land, 497. 


Lansdowne Hill, 535. 


tapestry of, as an authority, 103. 


Bamborough, Penda's attack on. 


Leipzig, 791. 


Beaufort, Cardinal, his position at 


59. 


Lewes, 179. 


the accession of Henry the 


Bancroft, Archbishop, his suppres- 


Lexington, 742. 


Sixth, 287. 


sion of Calvinism, 465. 


Malplaquet, 690. 


leads the war party, 293. 



INDEX. 



807 



Beauraont contrasted with Ben 
Jouson, 43T. 

Bee, Abbey of, founded by Herlouin, 
102. 

Becket ; see Beket. 

Bede, the Venerable ; see Baeda. 

Bedford, Duke of, in Henry the 
Sixth's time, effect of his death, 
2ST. 
his relations with the Duke of 
Gloucester, 2S9. 

Bedft)rd, Lord, in Charles the First's 
time, proposal of the King to 
him, 525. 

Bedford, Duke of, in George the 
Third's time, his character and 
policy, 733, 736. 

Bedloe, his assistance to Gates, 633. 

Beggars in Elizabeth's reign, 396. 

Beket, Gilbert, father of the arch- 
bishop, 120. 
Thomas, first English Archbishop 
of Canterbury since the Con- 
quest, 124. 
influenced by the Cistercians, 123. 
his relations with Theobald, 131. 
his education, ib. 
invites Henry the Second to En- 
gland, ib. 
fights in France, 133. 
his election to the See of Canter- 
bury, 133. 
his struggle with Henry, 134, 135. 
his death, 136. 

Bellarmine, Cardinal, 469. 

Benedict of Peterborough, 144. 

Benedict, Biscop, his abbey ac Jar- 
row, 74. 
his journeys, 64. 

Benfleet, Danish camp at, 84. 

Bentham, Jeremy, his creed, 790. 

Benvil de Saint Slaur as an author- 
ity, 103. 

Beornred, set up by Offa in Wes- 
sex, 76. 

Beornwulf, his struggles and death, 
77. 

Bercta, her marriage with .iEthel- 
berht, 54. 

Berkley, Judge, his opinion on 
Hampden's case, 51S. 

Bernicia, kingdom of, 52. 

Bertrand de Born leads an insur- 
rection against Richard the 
First, 139. 

Berwick, Edward the First's attack 
on, 210. 
cause of its peculiar position, 234. 
pacification of, 520. 

Bessin, the, ravaged by the French, 
106. 

Beverly, Alfred of, his history, 145. 

Bigod, Earl, threatened by Henry 
the Third, 177. 

Bigod, Earl Roger, opposes Edward 
the First, 225. 

Bill of Rights ; see Statutes. 

Birinns, a missionary in "Wessex, 
59. 

Biscop, Benedict, his career, 64. 

Bishops, the Seven, trial and acquit- 
tal of, 651. 
its effect, 658; see San croft, Jef- 
freys, etc. 

Black Death, the, its effects, 263. 

Blake, Admiral, 559, 562, 568, 675. 
his body taken from the grave, 
606. 

Blanchard, a French patriot, 282. 

Blood-boud, the, in early England, 
40. 



Blount, Francis, at Edward the Sec- 
ond's deposition, 229. 
Blucher, General, 793. 
Boccaccio, opinion held of, in En- 
gland, 402. 
Boethius, "Consolations" of, trans- 
lated by .Alfred, S3. 
Bohemia, James the First's policy 

toward, 4S1, 482. 
Bohun, Humfrey de, opposes Ed- 
ward the First, 225. 
Boisil, a missionary, 58. 
Boleyn, Anne, Henry's passion for 
her, 33S, 339. 
Lis indecent conduct about her, 

845. 
her coronation, ib. 
her execution, 362. 
her influence on the character of 
Elizabeth, 376, 377. 
Bolingbroke, Lord, comes into of- 
fice, 686. 
dismissed from office, 689. 
his attacks on the war with 

France, 690. 
his treaty of commerce, 694. 
his intrigues with the Pretender, 

ib. 
his policy, 695, 702. 
Bologna, university of, in the thir- 
teenth century, 157, 160. 
Bonaparte, Napoleon, defeats the 
English at Toulon, 769. 
his successes in Italy, 770. 
invades Egypt, 771. 
defeated in Syria, 772. 
crosses the Alps, ib. 
his intrigues in India, 779. - 
his aims, 780. 
his tyranny in France, ib. 
his alliance with Russia, 783. 
his intrigues in Spain, 784. 
his conquest of Austria, 785. 
his alliance with America, 787. 
his defeat in Russia, 788. 
his fall, 791. 
his return, 792. 

his final overthrow, 794, 795; see 
also Pitt, Wellington, Battles. 
Bonaparte, Jerome, 784. 
Bonaparte, Louis, ib. 
Bonaparte, Joseph, ib. 
Boniface, the missionary, 75. 
Boniface the Eighth (Pope), his 
claims, 212. 
his Bull Clericis Laicos, 224. 
Bonner, Bishop, his character and 
persecution, 872, 373. 
his "Six Bibles," 455, 456. 
Boroughs, representation of,198-200. 

rise of, 213-215. 
Boston, attacks on the tea-ships at, 

740. 
Bothwell, his character, 391, 392. 
Bouviues ; see Battles ; effects of, 

151, 152. 
Bnyle invents the air-pump, 597. 
"Boys," the party so-called, 704. 
Boyne ; see Battles. 
Bradshaw, John, made Judge of 
High Court, 555. 
sits in Parliament of 1G54, 563. 
his body taken from the grave, 
605, 606. 
Bretigny, Treaty of, 247. 
Brigham, Treaty of, 209. 
Britain, Roman conquest of, 42. 
eflecc of that conquest on, 43. 
descent of the Northern nations 

on, 43, 44. 
their conquest of it, 45-49. 



Britons, their attempted extermina- 
tion, 46-48. 
their later struggles, 50-52. 
Brittany, conquest of, by Fulc of 

Anjou, 127. 
Brittany, Duke of, Arthur ; see Ar- 
thur. 
Brooke, Lord, a leader of the Pres- 
byterians, 529. 
Brougham, Lord, helps to edit Ed- 

inburgh Review, 790. 
Browne, Archbishop, 447. 
Brownists, the, 466, 544. 
Bruce, Robert, his claims on Scot- 
land, 208. 
joins the English, 210. 
struggles for independence of 

Scotland, 212. 
Edward the Second's truce with, 

228. 
further struggles of, 229-232. 
Bruce, David, 233, 234. 
Brunswick, Duke of, marches 
against France, 767. 
effect of his march, ib. ; his re- 
treat, ib. 
Bruno, Elizabeth's discussion with, 

379. 
Bucer, burning of his bones, 374. 
Buckingham, Duke of, Edward Bo- 
hun, his execution, 334. 
George Villiers the First, James's 

favor for, 480. 
James's warning to, 4S6. 
Charles the First's defense of, 488. 
his impeachment, 489. 
his policy and its effect, 490, 491. 
his rivalry with Strafford, 508. 
his death, 493. 

George Villiers the Second sup- 
ports the old Presbyterian par- 
ty, 622. 
sent to the Tower by Dauby, 630. 
Bungay, his reputation, 174. 
Bunyan, John, 461. 
his imprisonment, 610. 
the "Pilgrim's Progress" and 

other writing, 611, 612. 
opposition to Declaration of In- 
dulgence, 650. 
Burbage, his opinion of Shaks- 

pere, 431. 
Burnett, Sir Francis, moves for re- 
form of Parliament, 790. 
Burgoyne, General, 743, 744. 

efl'ect of his defeat, 745. 
Burke, Edmund, point of contact 
of, with the Methodists, -711. 
his impeachment of WarrenHast- 

iugs, 753. 
his Bill for Economical Reform, 

756. 
his attitude toward the French 

Revolution, 761, 762. 
his early career, ib. 
his political principles, 762, 703. 
"Reflections on the French Rev- 
olution," 764. 
his opposition to Pitt and Fox, 

764, 765. 
his "Appeal from the New to the 

Old Whigs," 765. 
his advice to "diffuse terror," 

766. 
spread of his opinions in En- 
gland, 770, 
his "Letters on a Regicide 

Peace," ib. 
his death, 771. 
Burleigh, Lord, Elizabeth's choice 
of, 379. 



808 



INDEX. 



Burleigh, Lord, Elizabeth's confi- 
dence in him, 3S6. 
zeal for Protestant succession, 

391. 
opinion of the extravagance of 
wine-buyers, 400. 
Burley,the school-man, his reputa- 
tion, 174. 
Burnet, Bishop, his estimate of 
Cromwell's rule, 571. 
of Shaftesbury's temper, 625. 
of Charles the Second's temper, 
637. 
Burton, the Puritan, 516, 545. 
Bute, Lord, his character, 730, 731. 

his fall, 733. 
Butler, author of "Hudibras," 5SS. 

Cabal, the, 634. 
Cabinet, rise of, 635. 
the first, 674, 075. 
Cabot, Sebastian, his discoveries, 
315, 495. 
his father, 495. 
Cade, Jack, his rising, 294, 295. 
Cadwallon, King of Wales, his 
struggle against Northumbria, 
57. 
his death, ib. 
Csedmon, the first English poet, 55. 
I story of his vision, 02. 

importance of his poem, 63. 
Caen sacked by the French, 106. 
Csesar, Julius, reveals Britain to 
Rome, 42. 
revival of study of his works in 
the thirteenth century, 157. 
Cairo, convention of, 779. 
Calais, taking of, by Edward the 

Third, 244, 245. 
Calamy helps the Presbyterians, 

529. 
Cambridge,University of, our igno- 
rance of its early history, 156. 
its reputaticm for heresy, 357. 
treatment of, by James the Sec- 
ond, 648. 
Cameronians, their resistance to 

the Scotch Act of Union, 6S8. 
Campbell, 801. 
Campian, a Jesuit leader, 411, 412, 

469. 
Campo Formio, treaty of, 770. 
Canada, conquest of, 724,725. 
establishment of its constitution, 

705. 
invasion of, by the United States, 

792i 
later revolts in, 799. 
Canning, George, his devotion to 
Pitt, 754. 
his Ministry, 783. 
his firmness after Corunna, 785. 
his opinion about 'Walchereil ex- 
pedition, ib. 
his eagerness for Catholic Eman- 
cipation, 790. 
his foreign policy, 797. 
his death, ib. 
Canterbury, Augustine at, 54, 55. 
the centre of Latin influence, 55. 
plundered by the Danes, 78. 
Scriptorium 'of, 143. . 
"Canterbury Tales," 191, 23S-240. 
Capell, Lord, his execution, .557. 
Capuchins, the preachers of Cathol- 
icism, 469. 
Carlisle, conquered by Northum- 
brians, 68. 
Caroline of Anspach, Queen of 
George the Second, 702, 708. 



Caroline of Anspach, her death, 703. 
Carr, James the First's favor to, 

480. 
Carteret, his policy, 712. 
Cartwright, Thomas, 462, 403. 
driven from his professorship, 

405. 
his organization of the Church, 

407. 
growth of his doctrines, 529. 
Casaubou, his view of English feel- 
ing about literature, 457. 
Castlemaiue, Lady, her conversion, 

623. 
Castlereagh, Lord, his incompe- 
tence, 785. 
his opposition to reform, 790. 
his suicide, 797. 
Catherine of Arragon, her sympa- 
thy with Spain, 334. 
her appeal to the Pope, 338 ; see 
also Henry the Eighth. 
Catherine the Second of Russia, 

her partitions of Poland, 760. 
Catholics, Roman, feelings of, to- 
ward Elizabeth, 382, 387. 
their revolts against her, 394, 395. 
their relations with Mary Stuart, 

389, 390. 
decline of their faith, 408, 409. 
persecution of them, 411. 
their attitude during the reigns 
of Elizabeth and James the 
First, 407, 470. 
Charles the First's policy toward 
them, 487. 
excluded from the Parliament 

(of 1657), 578. 
their hopes in Charles the Sec- 
ond's reign, 631. 
their position in Ireland, 774. 
struggle for their emancipation, 
778,''798. 
Cato Street conspiracy, 790. 
Cavendish, family of, rise of, from 

spoil of monasteries, 350. 
Cavendish, Lord, helps to lead 
country party, 023. 
his support of William the Third, 
657. 
Caxton, William, his career, 307- 

311. 
Ceadda ; see Chad, St. 
Cecil, William ; see Burleigh, Lord. 
Cecil, Robert, Elizabeth's speech 
to, 454. 
effect of his death, 480, 481. 
Cecil, the Evangelical, 710. 
Cedd, his visit to Chad, 00. 
Centwine, King of Wessex, 70. 
Cenwulf succeeds Offa in Mercia, 

76. 
Ceolfrid, a scholar of Biscop's, 72. 
Ceolwulf, King of Northumbria, 72. 
Ceorl ; see Churl. 

Cerdic, chosen King of West-Sax- 
ons, 48. 
Ceylon retained by England at 

Peace of Amiens, 779. 
Chad, St., his mission to the Mer- 
cians, 60. 
his death, 61. 
Chalcondylas lectures at Oxford, 

313. 
Chancery, Court of, in reign of Ed- 
ward the First, 193. 
reformed by Cromwell, 572. 
Charles the Great, his struggle 

with Offa, 76. 
Charles the Fifth, the Emperor, 
Luther's answer to him, 331. 



Charles the Fifth, the Emperor, 
his policy toward Henry the 
Eighth, 334. 
Charles the Sixth of France, 280. 
Charles the Tenth of France, his 

fall, 798. 
Charles the First of England : 

the proposal about his marriage, 
485, 486. 

his conduct toward the Catho- 
lics, 486. 

his view of parliaments, 489. 

his defense of Buckingham, 4SS ; 
see Buckingham, Eliot, Pym, 
Hampden. 

his suppression of parliaments; 
see Parliaments. 

his financial policy, 505. 

his obstinacy, 507. 

attempts to arrest five members, 
and effect of his attempt, 530, 
531. 

raises standard at Nottingham, 
533. 

his intrigues after Naseby, 547, 
548. 

his trial and death, 555. 

eflect of his death, 556. 
Charles the Second, his accession, 
581. 

importance of his time, 586, 5S7. 

his study of physical science, 590. 

his vindictive demands, 603, 604. 

his policy about the Act of Uni- 
formity, 606, 60S. 

his character, 013, 016. 

his feeling about Roman Cathol- 
icism, 017. 

his view of England contrasted 
with that of James the Second, 
ib. 

his relations with Lewis the 
Fourteenth, 017, 618. 
Charles Edward, the Young Pr'fe- 
teuder, his insurrection against 
George the Second, 713-715. 
Charter of Henry the First, 119. 

of London, 120. 

the Great, 152-154. 

the Forest, 225. 
Chateau Gaillard, its importance to 
Richard the First, 140, 141. 

and English history, 142. 
Chatham, Earl of, effect of Pitt's 
taking the title, 730. 

his illness, ib. 

takes up Parliamentary reform, 
738. 

deplores the attack on the Bos- 
ton tea-ships, 740. 

his measures for conciliating 
America, 741, 744. 

his death, 744. 

effect of his dying appeal, 744, 
745. 

his plan of Parliamentary reform, 
750 ; sea also Pitt, William, the 
elder. 
Chaucer, his English, 239. 

his love of English, 240. 

character and work, 230-240. 

laughs at pardoners, 252, and ab- 
bots, 253. 

his exceptional position, 306. 

Caxtou's reverence for, 308. 
Chauvelin, French embassador for 

Republic, 766. 
Chester, its situation, 52. 

Danes driven from, 84. 

entered by William the Conquer- 
or, 112 ; see also Battles. 



INDEX. 



809 



Chester, Earl of, rebels against 

Henry the Third, 1G6. 
Chesterfield, Lord, 702, 704. 
his letters, 707. 

his opinion of state of England 
at time of Seven Years' War, 
71G. 
Chettle, Ms opinion of Shakspere, 

431. 
Chichester, Bishop of, his relations 

with De Montfort, ISO. 
Chichester, Sir Arthnr, his rule in 

Ireland, 452. 
Chillingworth, his denunciations 

of persecution, SflS, 599. 
China, treaty with, 800. 
Chivalry of Proissart, 203. 

of Edward the First, 203, 204. 
Christianity, original dislike of, by 
the Northern nations who came 
to England, 49. 
introduction of, into England, 
54-62. 
Chronicle, the English, as an au- 
thority, 44, 70, 77.^ 
in ^Ifi-ed's reign, S3, 84, 93, 110. 
Church of England founded by 
Theodore of Tarsus, G5. 
reformed by "William and Lan- 

franc, 114. 
representation of, in Parliament, 

200, 201. 
degradation of, in fourteenth and 

lifteenth centuries, 240. 
its position from time of Edward 
the Fourth to that of Eliza- 
beth, 303, 304. 
attitude of its leaders toward the 

New Learning, 321. 
Erasmus's attitude toward, 324, 

325. 
More's, 330-332. 
Thomas Cromwell's, 344-34G. 
Elizabeth's, 382, 383. 
Oliver Cromwell's, 572, 573. 
Church of Ireland; see Ireland, 

Church of. 
Churchill, John, Sunderland's 
speech to, 650; see Marlbor- 
ough, Duke of. 
Churl, his position, 41. 
Cistercians revive religions zeal in 

twelfth century, 123, 124. 
Clair-sur-Epte, peace of, 101. 
Clare, Lord, rewarded by William 
the First with grants of laud, 
113. 
Clarendon, Constitutions of, 134. 

assize of, 137. 
Clarendon, Lord, his view of the 
state of t!ie country in early 
part of Charles the First's 
reign, 508. 
made Chancellor, 603. 
his royulism, ib. 
Buegests amendments in Act of 

Uniformity, GOG. 
his fall, G19. 

his illegal proclamations, 642 ; see 
also Hyde. 
Clarendon, second Lord, G49. 
succeeded in government of Ire- 
laud by Tyrconnell, 65S. 
intrigues with James, G72. 
Clarkson, Thomas, the sympathy 
of the Methodists with him, 
711. 
Claudius, Emperor: sc« Britain, Ro- 
man conquest of. 
Clement the Fourth, his friendship 
for Roger Bacon, 164, 165. 



Clement the Seventh, Catherine's 
appeal to; see Catherine of Ar- 
ragon. 
Clifford, Lord, in Henry the Sixth's 
time, his career, 297. 
in Charles the Second's time, his 
share in the Treaty of Dover, 
C22. 
his advice about suspending pay- 
ments, ib. 
Clive, Robert, his rise, 721. 
his early battles, 722, 723. 
hel|)s Pitt to a seat iu Parliament, 

732. 
his reforms in India, 745. 
attitude toward him taken by the 
House of Commons, 746. 
Clnster-Seven, Convention of, 716. 

Pitt's rejection of it, 721. 
Cnut, comes to the throne, 94. 
change in his character, 95. 
his letter from Rome, ih. 
his laws, 90. 
his death, 97. 
Coiti, his argument for Christianity, 

56. 
Coke, Mr., of Norfolk, his large 

farms, 755. 
Coke, Sir Edward, his reverence for 
law, 479. 
his death, 522. 
Coleman, his letters about the Pop- 
ish Plot, 631. 
Colepepper, his denunciation of 
monopolists, 506. 
leaves Parliament after the Hull 
affair, 532. 
Colet, Dean, his exceptional posi- 
tion, 316. 
his teachings, 316-318. 
his school, 322. 
his sermons, 319, 323, 324. 
Colman, his contest with Wilfrith, 

64. 
Cologne, University of, its relations 

with Oxford, 174. 
Columba founds the monastery of 
Ion a, 5S. 
his authority appealed to, 64. 
Colnmban, an Irish missionary, 58. 
effect of his work in England, ib. 
Columbus discovers the New World, 

31.5. 
Commines, Philip de, his exception- 
al position, ib. 
Commission, Court of High, its ef- 
fect, 607. 
Commons, House of, how it was 
formed, 248. 
its early timidity, ib. 
force of its petitions, 249. 
its struggles with John of Gaunt, 

250. 
its degeneracy tmder the Lancas- 
trians, 285, 286. 
restriction of the right of election 

to it, 286. 
its attitude in 1530, 343. 
its position in Ehzabeth's reign, 

406-408. 
iu William the Third's reign, 673, 

074. 
its relations with Walpole, 701- 

703. 
its condition in time of elder Pitt, 

731,732. 
question of its reform, 738, 756, 
757, 790, 798, 802 ; .see also Pitt, 
Wilkes, Chatham, Burdett. 
Commonwealth, the English, 550- 
5G4. 



Commune, rise of, 220. 
Companies, Livery, ib. 
Compton, Bishop, his suspension 
from his office, 648. 
his support of William's claims, 
057. 
Comyn, John, Edward's vow to 

avenge his murder, 203. 
Connecticut ; see Warwick, Earl of. 
Conventicle Act, passing of, 609. 
Convention, the, in 16G0. 
its attitude toward Charles the 
Second, G03-600. 
Convocation, silencing of, by Henry 
the Eighth, 346. 
it draws up Articles of Religion, 
347. 
Cooper, Ashley, returned to Bare- 
bone's Parliament, 566. 
opposes Richard Cromwell, 580. 
advises the restoration of the ex- 
pelled members, 581. 
made Lord Ashley and Chancel- 
lor of Exchequer, 603 ; see Ash- 
ley, Lord, Shaftesbury, Lord. 
Coote, Sir Eyre, 745, 747. 
Cope, Sir John, in 1745, 714. 
Copernicus, effect of his discoveries, 

315. 
Cordova, the learning brought from, 
in t'ne twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries, 157. 
Corn, exportation of, by Britain, 43. 

Laws, repeal of, 800. 
Cornewaile, John, on reign of iDd- 

ward the Third, 230. 
Cornwall, effect on, of victory of 
Deorham, 53. 
its exceptional position, 534. 
Cornwall, Richard, Earl of, rises 
against Henry the Third, 175. 
attitude of, iu civil wars, ib. 
is captured it battle of Lewes, 180. 
Coruwallis, Lord, his defeat in 
America, 748. 
his rule in Ireland, 776. 
Cotentin, conquest of, 101. 
Cotton, oppression of, 522. 
Council, the Great, 194-190. 
(the Royal) Ordinances of, 248. 
increased power of, under Ed- 
ward the Fourth, 302. 
Country Party, the. Formation of, 

623. 
Courtenay, bishop and archbishop, 
his relations with the Lollards, 

257. 272, 273. 
Marquis of Exeter, his insurrec- 
tion and execution, 354. 
Covenant, the Scotch, signing of, in 
1640,519. 
Solemn League and, 530, 537- 
publicly burned after Restoration, 

606. 
abolished in Scotland, 016. 
Coventr.v, Sir William, helps to lead 

the country party, 623. 
Coverdale, Miles, revises 'the trans- 
lation of the Bible, 348. 
effect of his translation ; see En- 
gland, Literature of. 
Cowper, William, made Lord Keep- 
er, 687. 
Craftsmen, rise of, 213. 
their guilds, 216-218. 
Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, his 

dismissal, 4SG. 
Cranmer, Thomas, his proposal 
about the universities, 343. 
his appointment to Canterbury, 
345. 



810 



INDEX. 



Cranmer, Thomas, crowns Anne Bo- 
leyn, 345. 
pleads for Cromwell, 349. 
saved from arrest by Henry, 361. 
in danger after Six Articles Act, 

364. 
becomes a decided Protestant, 

364, 305. 
arrested, 36S. 
his execution, 373. 
Crimea, invasion of, 801. 
Crompton, his invention of the 

"mule," 754. 
Cromwell, Thomas, his career, 340- 

303 ; nee also Cranmer. 
Cromwell, Oliver, his words at 
Dunbar, 456. 
story of his first attempt to leave 

England, 503. ■ 
his second threat of leaving it, 

528. 
■wins Marston Moor, 537, 533. 
his early career, 539. 
organizes the Ironsides, 539-541. 
his attitude toward the Presby- 
terians, 546. 
his part in the discnssions be- 
tween Ireton and the King, 551. 
his victories against royalists, 

1648-'9, 553, 554. 
suppresses the mutiny of the 

troops, 557. 
his wai-s in Ireland and Scotland, 

558-561. 
his dissolution of the Rump, 504. 
his Protectorate, 565-579. 
his death, 579. 
effect of his death, ib. 
his body taken from the grave, 
005, 606 ; see also Battles. 
Cromwell, Henry, his settlement of 

Ireland, 572. 
Cromwell, Richnrd, peaceable ac- 
cession of, 579. 
his reign, 580. 
Crowland, abbey of, its rise, 6T. 
Cumberland, Earl of, defends Skip- 
ton Castle, 352. 
CuBtoms, English, use of, by Wil- 
liam the iFirst, 113. 
Cuthbert, story of his mission, 01, 
62. 
his episcopal rule and death, 68, 
69. 
Cuthwulf.King of West-Saxons, 51. 

Dacke, Lord, insnrgent in reign of 
Henry the Eighth, 353. 
also in reign of Elizabeth, 394. 
Dalaber, Anthony, a follower of 

Tyndale, 358. 
Dalhousie, Lord, effect of his an- 
nexation of Oude, 801. 
Danby, Lord, made Treasurer, 628. 
his policy, 628-631. 
cause of "his fall, 633, 634. 
his impeachment, 635. 
his support of William, 657-660. 
compared with Walpole, 702. 
Danegeld arranged by Court of 

Exchequer, 125. 
Danelagh, conquest of, by Eadward 

the Elder, 85. 
Danes, their first invasion of En- 
gland, 77-79. 
repulsed by iElfred, 80. 
fresh invasion in reign of .fflthel- 

red, 91. 
massacre of, ib. 
invasion of Swegen, ib. 
they slay Archbishop .iElf heah, ib. 



Danes, their conquest of England, 
92. 
their rule, 93-97. 
fall of their power, 97. 
they invade England under Swe- 
gen, 111. 
induced to leave England by Wil- 
liam, 112. 
invasion of, resisted by William, 
117. 
Daniel, the poet, 402. 
Darcy, Lord, insurgent in reign of 

Henry the Eighth, 353. 
Darnley; s«e Mary Stuart. 
Dartmorth, Lord, interferes with 

James, 672. 
David, of Wales, rebellion and death 

of, 190. 
Deane, General, his successes, 571. 
Declaration of Indulgence by 
Charles the Second, 622. 
by James the Second, 049-651. 
of Rights, 663, 665. 
of Independence, 743. 
Deira, 52. 

becomes Yorkshire, 87. 
Dekker, a successor of Heywood, 

434. 
De la Mare, Peter, 250. 
Denewulf,Bishopof Winchester, 81. 
Derby, Earl of, in Victoria's reign, 
his first ministry, 800. 
his second ministry, 802. 
his Reform Bill, ib. 
Derby, Henry, Earl of, his attitude 
in Richard's reign, 276; seeHen- 
ry the Fourth. 
Dermot, King of Leinster, 440, 441. 
Desborough, General, resigns his 

command to Cromwell, 577. 
Descartes, a contemporary of Ba- 
con, 595. 
Desmond, Earl of, treatment of, by 
Henry the Seventh, 443. 
by Elizabeth, 451. 
D'Espec influenced by the Cister- 
cians in the twelfth century, 
123. 
Despenser, the career of, 227, 228. 
Devon, effect on, of victory of Deor- 
ham, 53. 
men of, rise against Normans, 
111. 
De Witt, his utterance about En- 
glish sailors, 612. 
his policy toward France, 654. 
his fall, ib. 
Digby, Lord, his denunciation of 

Strafford, 524. 
Digges, Sir Dudley, his taunt to 
Buckingham, 489. 
his imprisonment, ih. 
Disraeli, Benjamin, his Reform Bill, 
802. 
his different ministries, ib. 
Domesday-Book as an authority, 
110. 
how it was compiled, 114. 
Dominic, zeal of, 172. 
Dominicans, lectures of, at Oxford, 

174. 
Dorchester, established as the po- 
litical see of South Britain, 159. 
Dorsetshire, the men of, rise against 

the Normans, 111. 
Douglas, his relations with Bruce, 

231-233. 
Dover secured by William the Con- 
queror, 111. 
its resistance to Lewis of France, 
155. 



Dover, Treaty of, 622. 
Drake, Sir Francis, his early career, 
416, 417. 
his check to the Armada, 419. 
his final defeat of it, 421. 
his voyage round the w(n-ld, 422. 
Drogheda, Massacre of, 558. 
Dryden, his view of the impor- 
tance of the Triple Alliance, 
620. 
his account of Shaftesbury, 62.^ 
Dumouriez, General, his first suc- 
cesses, 767. 
Dundee, Marquis of, his strusrgle 
against William the Third,' 663. 
Duns Scotns, his rank as a school- 
man, 174. 
Dunstan, his early life, 86. 
■ Abbot of Glastonbury, 87. 
Minister of Eadmund, ib. 
policy of, ib. 
exiled, ib. 

Bishop of London and Winches- 
ter, 88. 
Archbishop of Canterbury, t6. 
Minister of Eadgar, revives mon- 
asteries, ib. 
crowns Eadward the Martyr, 91. 
death of, ib. 

importance of his life, 143. 
Dupleix founds French empire in 
India, 721. 
his career, 721, 722. 
Durham, Bishop of, at battle of 

Falkirk, 212. 
Dnrrow, University at, 58. 
Dykvell, his work for William of 
Orange in England, 657. 

Eadbekut, King of Northumbria, 
74. 
Pippin's friendship for him, 76. 
Eadgar, King, 88. 
his laws, 76. 

the JEtheling, placed on the En- 
glish throne, 109. 
his submission to the Conqueror, 

140. 
joins the Danes, 111. 
takes refuge in Scotland, 112. 
establishes a king there, 119. 
Eadmer, his life of Anselm, 144. 
Eadmund, King of East Anglia, 

murder of, 79. 
Eadmund Ironside, his struggles 

and death, 94. 
Eadric of Mercia, murder of, by 

Cnut, 95. 
Eadward the Elder, 85. 
his conquests, ib. 
he is chosen king by the Scots, 
206. 
Eadward the Martyr, crowned by 
Dunstan, 91. 
murdered, ib, 

the Confossoi', made king, 97. 
his favor to the Normans, 99. 
struggle with Godwine, ib. 
his death, 100. 

story of his promise to Duke 
AVilliam, 107. 
Eadwig the Fair, his marriage, 87. 
banishes Dunstan, ib. 
revolts against him, 88. 
Eadmund Ironside's brother, 
murdered by Cnut, 95. 
Eadwine, an exile from Northum- 
bria, 53. 
comes to the Northumbrian 

throne, 55. 
his reign and death, 56, 57. 



INDEX. 



811 



Eadwine of Mercia supports Ead- 
gar the ^theliiig, 109. 
submits to William, 111. 
Ealdhelm, Bishop, his sougs, 82. 
Ealdormen, SI. 

Ealdred, Archbishop of York, 
crowns William the Conqaer- 
or, 110. 
Ealhred of Northumbria, his ap- 
peal to Charles the Great, T6. 
Ealhstan, Bishop of Sherburne, TS. 
Eardwulf, King of Northumbria, 
received when an exile by 
Charles the Great, 7G. 
East Anglia, conquered by the 
Jutes, 53. 
becomes Christian, 55. 
conquered by Mercia, 70. 
rebels against Mercia, TT. 
landing of the Danes there, 79. 
Earldom of, created by Cnut, 95 ; 
see also Eadmund, Esedwald. 
East-Saxons ; see Essex, Saxons, 
their settlement, 51. 
conquered by Northumbria, 55. 
heathendom of their kings, 56. 
Ebbsfleet, first landing-place of En- 
glish in Britain, 45. 
of Augustine, 54. 
Ecclesiastical Commission, 464, 4G5. 
Ecgberht, Archbishop of York, 

Bseda's letter to, 73. 
Ecgberht, King of Wessex, 76. 
his conquests, 76, 77. 
becomes king of the English, 76. 
his work undone by the Danes, 
79. 
Ecgfrith, his relations with his 
wife, 67. 
his rule of Northumbria, 68. 
his defeat and death, 69. 
effect of his death, 70. 
his conquest of Scotland, 205. 
Ecgwine, Bishop of Worcester, his 

preaching, 67. 
Edinburgh, its foundation, 56. 
becomes capital of the Scotch 
kings, 87. 
Edinburgh Review started, 790. 
Edmund ; see Eadmund. 
Edmundsbury, St., 79. 
" Jews' Houses" ar, 115. 
growth of, 121, 122. 
Edward; for the pre -Norman 

kings, see Eadward. 
Edward, son of Margaret, made 

kingof Scotland, 119. 
Edward the First of England, his 
youth, 189. 
his conquest of Wales, 188-190. 
his relations to modem England, 

191. 
to parliaments, ib. 
his judicial reforms, 192, 193. 
his legislation, 193, 198. 
his parliaments, 198-201. 
his personal character, 202-204. 
his relations with Scotland, 204. 
his conception of kingship, 220. 
his treatment of the Jews and 

the clergv, 223, 224. 
his death, 225. 
Edward the Second, his relations 
with the barons, 225, 226. 
his truce with Bruce, 228. 
his vices and fall, ib. 
Edward the Third, his election, ib. 
his arrest of Mortimer, 238. 
progress during his reign, 235- 

238. 
effect of his accession, 240-242. 



Ed ward theThird, his relations with 
Flanders and France, 241-247. 
with Parliament, 247-250. 
Edward, the Black Prince, his share 
in the struggles against John 
ofGauut, 249, 250. 
Edward the Fourth, his election, 
298. 
his marriage, deposition, and res- 
toration, 299, 300. 
his position as a king, 302-306. 
his character, 304. 
Edward the Fifth, .S11. 
Edward the Sixth, 365-368. 
Egypt ; see Bonaparte. 

evacuation of, its effects, 779. 
Eleanor, wife of De Moutfort, 175. 
wife of Edward the First, 189, 
202. 
Elfeg, importance of his life, 143. 
Eliot, Sir John, his first election, 
478. 
his position in the early strug- 
gle against Charles the First, 
488. 
his attacks on Buckingham, 489. 
his arrest, ib. 
moves the Short Remonstrance, 

492. 
his opinion of Buckingham, 493. 
his work the source of the Grand 
Remonstrance, 494, 495. 
Elizabeth, Queen, state of England 
at her accession, 875. 
her appearance and character, 

876-381. 
her policy, 381-384. 
effect of her policy; see England, 
her ecclesiastical'policy, 410, 411. 
her last days, 458, 454. 
her " tuning the pulpits," 456. 
immorality of her court, 479. 
Ely, Abbey of, founded, 67. 

burned by Danes, 79. 
England, Old, its origin, 39, 40. 
character of its inhabitants and 
laws, 40, 42. 
England, Literature of, how affect- 
ed by .lElfred, 83. 
poverty of, under Harold, 99. 
how it explains the position of 
the country in time of John, 
143. 
between Chaucer and Caxton, 

306-308. 
its revival under Elizabeth, 401- 

404. 
effect of Tyndale and Coverdale 
on, 455. 
England, Church of; see Church of 
England, 
language of, progress of, in time 
of Edward the Third, 235, 236. 
England, New, its position after 
war between United States and 
England, 792. 
Eorl, in Early England, 41. 
Episcopacy; «ee Pym, Hampden. 
Erasmus, his visit to England, 317, 
819. 
his "Praise of Folly," 319. 
Essex, first colonization of, by En- 
glish, 51. 
Essex, Earl of, Elizabeth's favor 
to, 879. 
his insurrection, 435. 
his failure in Ireland, 451. 
Essex, Earl of, in Long Parliament, 
aiipointed leader of Parliament- 
ary forces, .533. 
his policy, 533, 536. 



Essex, Earl of, raises siege of 

Gloucester, 535. 
Essex, Earl of, in Charles the Sec- 
ond's time, takes office, 633. 
his policy, 636, 639. 
his death, 641. 
Ethel weard, his exceptional posi- 
tion in our literature, 143. 
Eugene of Savoy, his success at 
Cremona, 684, 685. 
his union with Marlborough, 685. 
Euphuism, discussed by Elizabeth, 
379. 
protest of Marlowe against it, 

430. 
gives way before Puritanism, 
436 ; see also Lyly. 
Eustace of Boulogne, his strife with 
burghers of Dover, 99. 
his aid sought by men of Kent 
against Normans, 111. 
Eustace the Monk, 156. 
Evesham, origin of, 6T. 
battle of; see Battles. 
Examiner, the, written by Boling- 

broke, 690. 
Exchequer, Court of, its work un- 
der Henry the First, 124, 125. 
Excise Bill, 701. 
Exclusion Bill, 628. 
Exeter, siege of, by the Danes, 80. 
takes active part against the Nor- 
mans, 111. 
besieged by the English, j6. 
relieved by Fitz-Osbern, ib. 
■welcomes the barons, 152. 

Pabyan, his Chronicle as an Au- 
thority, 285. 
Fagius, burning of his bones, 374. 
Fairfax, General, his first appoint- 
ment by Parliament, 534. 
effect on him of the king's trea- 
son, 553. 
raises the cry of a free Parlia- 
ment, 581. 
Falkirk, battle of; see Battles. 
Falkland, Lord, his character, 528. 
his views on Church reform, 529. 
leaves Parliament after the re- 
fusal of Hotham, 532. 
his death, 536. 
his theology, 590. 
Farmer-class, rise of, 261. 
Fastolf, Sir John, his patronage of 

Caxton, 310. 
Faukes, de Breaut6, his rebellion, 

166. 
Fawkes, Guido (Guy) ; see Gunpow- 
der Plot. 
Ferrars, Bishop of St. David's, exe- 
cution of, 372. 
Feudalism, introduced by William 
the First, 112. 
effect of, on England, 113, 114. 
relation of universities to, 160, 

161. 
ruined by Wars of Roses, 301. 
Edward the First's relations to, 
222-225. 
Finch, Chief- Justice, his opinion 
on Hampden's case, 518. 
his flight, 524. 
Fitz-Neal, his book on the Ex- 
chequer, 144. 
Fitz-Osbern, Roger, rebels against 

William, 116. 
Fitz-Osbern, William, is left in 
charsre of England by William 
the First, 110. 
relieves Exeter, 111. 



812 



INDEX. 



Fitz-Osbern, 'William, receives 

grant of manors, 113. 
Fitz-Osbert; see William Long- 
beard. 
Fitz-Ealf, Archbishop, his attack 

on Friars, 253. 
Fitz-Thomas chosen mayor, 220. 
Fitzurse ; see Beket, death of. 
Fitz-Walter, Captain of the City of 
London, 121. 
Marshal of the Army of God and 

Holy Church, 152. 
taken prisoner, 156. 
Fitz-Warrenne, Fulk, drives Jlartin 

from England, ITO. 
Fitzwilliam family, rise of, from 

spoil of monasteries, 850. 
Five-Mile Act, G09. 
Flamsteed, the astronomer, 59T. 
Flanders, relations of Edward the 
Third to, 242. 
Caxton educated in, SOT. 
importance of its trade to En- 
gland, S93. 
Fleetwood, resigns his command to 
Cromwell, 57T. 
remonstrates acainst the dissolu- 
tion of 1657, 5T9. 
his conduct during the second 
Protectorate, 581. 
Fletcher contrasted with Ben Jon- 
sou, 486, 43T. 
Flood, Henry, his support of Irish 

independence, 7T4. 
Florence, of Worcester, as an au- 
thority, 84, 93, 110. 
Florence, poets of, 101, 171. 
her relation to letters in the sis- 
teenth century, 815. 
Folk, greater and lesser, in towns, 

218, 219. 
Fontainebleau, treaty of, 784. 
Ford contrasted with Ben Joiison, 

437. 
Forest laws, the, enacted by Cuut, 

96. 
Fortescue, Sir John, his doctrine 
about English monarchy, 302 ; 
see also 315. 
Fox, Bishop, his favor to Erasmus, 
325. 
his favor to Wolsey, 332. 
Fox, George, his prophecy of Crom- 
well's death, 579. 
Fox, Charles James, his opinion of 
Pitt, 750. 
his coalition with LordNorth, 751. 
his India Bill, ib. 
his policy toward France, 754. 
his enthusiasm at fall of Bastille, 

760. 
his intrigues about the Regency, 

ib. 
his opinion of Burke, 762. 
his Libel Act, 764. 
his support of France, 7CS. 
George the Third's dislike of, 781. 
his ministry, 782. 
his death, ib. 
Poxe, John, his "Book of Martyrs," 

410. 
France, early history of; se-e Lewis 
the Ninth, Edward the Third, 
Henry the Fifth, Joan of Arc, 
Lewis the Fourteenth, Lewis 
the Fifteenth, Voltaire, Rous- 
seau. 
States-General in, 760. 
fall of the Bastile in, ib. 
attitude of English statesmen to- 
ward ; see Pitt, Fox, Burke. 



France declares war against Aus- 
tria, 766. 
declares war on England, 767. 
character of its government dur- 
ing Revolution, 767. 
war with England; see Pitt; see 
also Bonaparte, Wellington. 
Francis of Assisi, his life, 172. 
Francis the First of France, Henry 
the Eighth's friendship for, 332. 
his interference with the Univer- 
sity of Paris, 343. 
Franklin, Beujamiu, Whitfield's ef- 
fect on, 70S. 
Franks, r-slations of, with England, 

75, 76. 
Frederick, Prince of Wales, sou of 

George the Second, 703. 
Frederic the Second, Emperor, how 

regarded in Europe, 161. 
Frederick the Second of Prussia, 
seizes Silesia, 705. 
his second war, 71.S. 
his Seven Years' War, 716. 
his opiniim of Pitt, 717. 
Pitt's assistance to him, 728. 
Pitt's opiuion of him, 720. 
liis despair at Pitt's fall, 730. 
his administrative reform, 759. 
Freeman, the, sinks into the villein, 

89. 
French influences on Edward the 

First, 203, 204. 
Friars, effect on English universi- 
ties, 162, 174, 175. 
work of, in towns, 172, 173. 
their struggle against learning, 

174. 
position in the barons' war, 175. 
attacked by Fitz-Ealf and Wyc- 
lif, 253. 
Frisia, Boniface in, 75. 
Frisian, the story told of, by Baeda, 

50. 
Frith-guilds, 215, 216. 
Frobisher, Elizabeth's favor to, 379. 

his discoveries, 496. 
Froissart, his view of chivalry ; see 
Chivalry, 
his picture of Edward at Poitiers, 
246, 247. 
Fulc, the Red, second Count of An- 
jou,120. 
the Good, third Count, ib. 
the Black, his cruelty, 127, 128. 
of Jerusalem, 128, 

Gage, General, made governor of 

Massachusetts, 741. 
Galileo, a contemporary of Bacon, 

595 
Gall, St., 58. 
Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, 

302. 
Garnet the Jesuit, 470. 
Gauden, Dr., writes the "Eikon 

Basilike," 557. 
Gaunt, Elizabeth, executed, 645. 
Gaunt, John of, invades France, 
249. 
leads the barons, 250. 
despises the Commons, ib. 
relations of, with Wyclif, 2.54. 
flies from insurgents, in 1381, 267. 
his claina on the Spanish crown, 
27-4. 
Gaveston, Piers, his character and 

career, 226, 227. 
Gay, his opinion of politicians, 730. 
Geoffrv, Martel, Count of Anjou, 
105. 



Geoffry, Martel, his death, 106. 

compared with his father, 128. 
Geoff'ry Grey-gown, his loss of pow- 
er, 127. 
of Anjou, how treated by his fa- 
ther, ib. 
of Monmouth, his histors', 144, 
188. 
George the First, his position con- 
trasted with that of William 
and Mary and of Anne, 666. 
results of his accession, 694, 695. 
George the Second, his hatred of 
Walpole, 702. 
guided by his wife, ih. 
"supports Carteret, 712. 
George the Third, effects of his 
rule, 729, 730. 
his character and policy, ib. 
his treatment of the House of 

Commons, 732. 
his despotic rule, 730, 737. 
his opposition to Catholic Eman- 
cipation, 778, 779. 
his death, 796, 797. 
George the Fourth, accession of, 
797. 
his attack on his wife, ib. 
Gerald de Barri, his position in lit- 
erature, 146. 
his work, 146, 147. 
Geraldines, the, in Ireland, 443, 444. 
Giffard, Bonaveuture, a Roman 
Catholic, President of Magda- 
len College, 648. 
Gildas, his account of the state of 

Britain, 48. 
Ginkell, General, 670. 
Girondins, their aim, 766. 
Gladstone, Mr., his ministry, 802. 
Glanvil, Ranulf de, takes the King 
of Scotland prisoner, 137. 
his treatise on law, 144. 
Glastonbury monastery, founded by 
Ini, 70. 
Dunstau born at, 86. 
Dunstan, Abbot of, 87. 
Arthur's tomb at, 145. 
Glencoe, Massacre of, 664. 
Glendower, Owen, his rising, 279. 
Gloucester,Earl of, Gilbert de Clare, 
his relations with the barons' 
party, 177, ISO, 181. 
Gloucester, Duke of, uncle of Rich- 
ard the Second, 275. 
Gloucester, Duke Humphrey, his re- 
gency, 289. 
his relations with Jacqueline of 

Brabant, ih. 
his death, 294. 

his seizure of the books at the 
Louvre, 310. 
Gloucester, Richard, Duke of; set 

Richard the Third. 
Goderich, Lord, forms a ministry 

ou Canning's principles, 797. 
Godolphin, his rise, 682, 683. 

I. s fall, 691. 
Godwine, his rise, 97. 
Earl of Wessex, ib. 
his ability and policy, ib. 
his wise rule, 98. 
his struggle with Eadward, 09. 
his exile, ib. 

his return and death, ib. 
Gondomar, 483,484. 
Goodman, Bishop, dies a Papist, 

501. 
Gower, his position as a poet, 306. 
Grattan, Henry, his opposition to 
Pitt's financial policy, 758. 



INDEX. 



813 



Grattan, Henry, his support of Irish 

independence, 75S. 
Greene, 42!), 430, 4B2. 
Greenvil, a leader of Cornish Roy- 
alists, 635. 
Greeuway the Jesuit, 470. 
Gregory the Great, his interview 
'with the English slaves, 54. 
his admiration of the Angles, 

whom he calls angels, ih. 
sends Augustine to'Eugland, ?&. 
hia pastorals translated by .Al- 
fred, S3. 
Gregory the Seventh, his struggle 

with William the First, 115. 
Grenville, why he lost America, 
T2S 
his dislike of Pitt, 733. 
comes into office, 733, 734. 
his prosecution of Wilkes, 734. 
Grenville, Lord, his opinion of state 
of England, 769. 
refuses office without Fox, 731. 
comes into office, 7S2. 
dislikes slave-trade, 7S3. 
driven from office, ib. 
Grey, Lady Jane, her marriage, 
368. 
her reign, ih. 
her death, 369. 
Grey, Lord, his Reform Bill, T98. 

his other reforms, 798, 799. 
Grimbald, JSlfred's employment of, 

S3. 
Grindecohbe, 267, 268. 
Grocyn, fellow of New College, 316 

-318. 
Grosseteste, his advice to Bacon, 
163. 
dies at fend with Rome, ITl. 
his Constitutions, 172. 
his correspondence with De ! 
Montfort, 176. 
Grotius, his account of English the- 
ology, 457. 
Grow, helps to found vegetable 

physiology, 597. 
Guilds, 215-218. 
Gunpowder Plot, 470. 
Guthlac, Abbot of Crowland, 67. 
Guthrum, the Dane, becomes King 
ofEast Anglia, 80. 
Alfred makes peace with, ih. 
Guy, of Amiens, his poem as au 

authority, 103. 
Gwalchmai, his song, 187. 
Gwyn, Nell, Charles the Second's 

request to James about, 644. 
Gvrth, son of Godwine, killed at 
battle of Seulac, 109. 

Habeas Cobt-us Aot ; see Statutes. 
Hale, Sir Matthew, appointed to 
reform the law, 562, 566. 
introduces a bill for Church com- 
prehension, 605. 
Hales, a latitudinarian, 470, 600, 

601. 
Hales, Sir Edward, 647. 
Halifax, Lord, on Monmouth's suc- 
cession, 637. 
on Exclusion Bill, 639. 
on Limitation Bill, 640. 
advice to Charles after passing 

Habeas Corpus Act, 043. 
his dismissal, 647. 
presents crown to William the 
Third, 661. 
Hall, Bishop, his satires, .^14. 
Hallam, his opinion of Shakspere, 
435. 



Hallam, his opinion of the law of 
conspiracy, 525. 
of Charles the Second's position, 
641, 642. 
Halley, investigates tides, 597. 
Hamilton, Marquis of, as Royal 
Commissioner in Scotland, 519. 
Hamilton, Duke of, rallies the Roy- 
alists against Argyle, 552, 553. 
execution of, 557. 
Hampden, his attitude towardEpis- 
copacy, 462. 
his refusal of the forced loan, 

490. 
his refusal to pay ship-money, 

517. 
his trial, 518, 519. 
his tact in hindering a fight in 

the Commons, 528. 
his death, 535. 
Harding, character of his Chron- 
icles, 306. 
Hardy, trial of, 770. 
Hargreaves, his invention of spin- 
ning-jenny, 754. 
Harley, Robert, comes into office, 
686. 
dismissed from office, 6S9. 
his patronage of Mrs. Masham, 

691. 
his return to office, ih. 
his intrigues with the Pretender, 

694. 
their effects, ih. 
Harold, King, Cuut's son, 97. 
Harold, son of Godwine, Earl of 
East-Anglia, 98. 
his statesmanship, 99, 100. 
his campaign in Wales, 99.' 
his accession, 100. 
his oath to Duke William, 107. 
his preparations for the struggle 

with William, 108. 
defeatsHaraldHardrada at Stam- 
ford Bridge, ih. 
his death in battle of Senlac, 109. 
effect of his victories in Wales, 
186. 
Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, 
invades England, lOS. 
is defeated at Stamford Bridge, 
ih. 
Harrison, General, his share in dis- 
solution of the Rump Parlia- 
ment, 564. 
his execution, 603. 
Harvey, his opinitm of Bacon, 594. 

his discovery, 595, 596. 
Haslerig, attempted arrest of, 530. 
accused of corruption, 562. 
opposition of, to dissolution of 
Parliament in favor of Council 
of State, 563. 
returned to the Parliament of 
. 1654, 568. 

his attitude in it, 569. 
excluded from the Parliament of 

1657, 576. 
demands the dismissal of Fleet- 
wood and Lambert, 581. 
Hastings ; see Battles. 
Hastings, Danish leader, 84. 
Hastings, Warren, good side of his 
policy, 746. 
severe side, 747, 748. 
his impeachment, 752, 753. 
its effect, 753. 

attitude of Pitt toward him, ih. 
Hastings, Lord, his death, 311. 
Harthacnut, King,97. 
his crimes and lawlessness, ih. 

52 



Harthacnut, his death, 97. 
Havelock, Sir Henry, 801. 
Hengest, lands in Kent, 45. 

his death, ih. 
Henry of Huntingdon, as an author- 
ity, 70. 
Henry of Blois, as papal legate, 130. 
Henry the First of England makes 

terms with clergy, 119. 
seizes the crown, ib. 
his relations to the English, ib. 
his character, ib. 
his marriage, ib. 
his simony, 123. 
his invasion of Normandy, 124. 
Henry the Second of England, his 

character, 132. 
his policy, 133. 

his struggle with Beket, 134, 135. 
his legal reforms, 134, 136-139. 
his death, 139. 

his treatment of Ireland, 439-441. 
Henry the Third of England, hia 

coronation, 155. 
rise of universities in his time, 

156. 
his relations with Hubert de 

Burgh, 167. 
refuses justice to Londoners, 168. 
his quarrel with the Earl Mare- 

schal, 169. 
his alliance with the Pope, 170. 
Henry the Fourth of France, his 

energy, 409. 
his conversion, ih. 
his opinion of James the First, 

471. 
good eflfects of his policy, 652. 
Henry the Fourth of England, his 

insurrection against Richard 

the Second, 276, 277. 
his accession, 278. 
his policy toward the Church, 

278, 279. 
his struggle in Wales, 279. 
his death, 280. 
Henry the Fifth, his persecution 

of the Lollards, ih. 
his conquest of Prance, 280-284. 
his death, 284. 
effect of his death, 287. 
Henry the Sixth, effect of his long 

minority, 235. 
restrictive act passed under ; see 

Commons, House of. 
his illness and recovery, 296. 
causes of his fall, 290, 297. 
his restoration, 300. 
his death, ib. 
Henry the Seventh, his position as 

a sovereign, 313, 314. 
his foreign policy, 319, 320; nee 

also Ireland. 
Henry the Eighth, his accession, 

319. 
his marriage, 320. 
his foreign policy, 320. 
his sympathy with Dean Colet, 

324. 
his favor to More, 327. 
his despotic policy, 331-336; see 

also Ireland, 
his book against Luther, 331. 
circumstances of his divorce, 337 

-339. 
Wolsey's view of his character, 

340. 
his claim to be head of the 

Church, 344. 
his view about the translation of 

the Bible, 347. 



814 



INDEX. 



Henry the Eighth, his relations 
with Cromwell, 349. 
his later career, 3G3, 364. 
effect of his character on Eliza- 
beth, 376. 
Herbert, Lord, in Parliament of 

1654, 5(58. 
Herbert Wake-dog, Count of Tou- 

raine, 12S. 
Herbert, George, as a clergyman, 

409. 
Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, a 

friend of Hobbes, 600. 
Herford, Nicholas, a follower of 

Wyclif, 255. 
Ilerkniin of Brionue founds Abbey 

of Bee, 102. 
Hexham, priors of, historians of 

Stephen's reign, 143. 
Hey wood, a successor of Shakspere, 

434. 
High Court of Commission; see 

Commission, High Court of. 

Hild founds Whitby monastery, 62. 

Hobbes, Thomas, his first works 

on government, 590. 

his career and works, 600-002. 

Hoby, Sir Edward, his complaint, 

408. 
Holland, indignation in, at Charles 
the First's death, 556. 
war with, afier Restoration, 612, 

613. 
hatred of Lewis the Fo\u-teeuth 

for, 620, 621. 
remonstrance of Lewis the Four- 
teenth with, 623. 
alliance of, with England on be- 
half of Turkey, 761. 
absorbed by French Republic, 
779. 
Holland, Lord, execution of, 557. 
Holies, attempted arrest of, 530. 
his leadership of the Presbyteri- 

aus, 548. 
his expulsion from Parliameut, 
550. 
Hooke improves the microscope, 

597. 
Hooker, Richard, as a clergyman, 
409. 
as a writer, 423. 

his "Ecclesiastical Polity," 423, 
463, 464. 
Hooper, execntion of, 372. 
Hopton, Sir Ralph, a Royalist lead- 
er, 535. 
HorsM, coming of, 44. 

death of, 46. 
Home Tooke, his trial, 770. 
Horner helps to edit Edinburgh 

Review, 790. 
Horsted, historical importance, 46. 
Hotham, Sir John, his refusal to 

admit the Kins to Hull; 532. 
Hotspur; sec Northumberland. 
Houeh, President of Magdalen Col- 
lege, 648. 
Hounslow, James's camp at, 647. 
Howard, Admiral, Lord, 420. 
Howard, Lord, in Charles the First's 
time,presents petition for peace 
with Scotland, 521. 
Howard, John, 711. 
Howe, John, 607. 
refuses Declaration of Indul- 
gence, 649, 650. 
Howe, General, 743, 744. 
Howel Dhu, laws of, 185. 
Hubert, Walter, effect of his death, 
149. 



Hubert, "Walter, his execution of 

William Longbeard, 220. 
Hubert de Burgh, resists Lewis of 
France, 155. 
his character as a rnler, 165, 166. 
opposes the Earl of Chester, 166. 
his fall, 167. 
Huguenots, relations of Elizabeth 

of England to, 416, 417. 
Huskisson, 797. 

Hussey, Lord, his view of affairs in 
Henry the Eighth's reign, 352. 
his execution, 353. 
Hutchinson, Colonel, account of 
him by his wife, 457, 4.58. 
Mrs., her denunciation of James's 
court, 479. 
Hyde, Edward, brings in a bill for 
making Long Parliament per- 
petual, 526. 
joins the Royalist cause, 528. 
issues State Papers for the king, 

531. 
leaves Parliament after the re- 
sistance of Hotham to Charles, 
532; see Clarend<m. 
defeats Hale's bill for Church 
compreheusion, 605. 

Independents, their assertion of 

freedom of belief, 60S. 
India, French empire in, 716. 

conquest of, by England; see 
Clive. 

reforms in ; see Clive. 

Regulation Act ; see Statutes; see 
ailso Hastings (Warren) and 
Burke (Edmund). 

bills for government of; see Pox, 
Pitt (William the yonnger), 
Tippoo Sahib, Wellesley, Bat- 
tles. 

saved by Convention of Cairo, 
779. 

effect of Affghan war upon, 799. 

the mutiny and its results, 801, 
802. 
Ingulf of Croyland, his work a for- 
gery, 110. 
Ini, King of Wessex, 70. 
Innocent the Third, his position, 
149. 

his relations with John, 149, 150. 

his suspension of Langtou, 155. 
lona, monastery of, founded by Co- 
lumba, 58. 

receives the exiles from St. Aid- 
an's, 64. 
Ireland, revolts in, their effect on 
Spenser's life, 427. 

circumstances of its conquest in 
the twelfth century, 439^442. 

struggles there, after the con- 
quest by Strongbow, 442, 443. 

treatment of, by Henry the Sev- 
enth and Eighth, 443-446. 

effect of the Reformation in, 446- 
448. 

of the Catholic reaction, 448-4,51. 

conquest of, by Elizabeth, 445, 450 
-452. 

treatment of, by Strafford ; see 
Wentworth. 

Charles the First appeals to, 
against England, 536-538. 

Cromwell's "conquest of; see 
Cromwell, Drogheda, Wexford. 

effect on, of Charles the Second's 
policy, 615, 616. 

William's conquest of, 670. 

its soldiers, attempt of James the 



Ireland. — Continued. 

Second to enroll them in his 
army, 058. 

asserts its independence in 1782, 
748. 

England's difficulty in Pitt's time, 
757, 758. 

rising in 1798, 771. 

its position under the Georges, 
773, 774. 

its state during the time of inde- 
pendence, 774, 775. 

union of, with England ; see Pitt ; 
see also Grattan, Flood. 

Church of, 57-59. 

its relation to the English 
Church, 5S. 

effect on, of the Synod of Whit- 
hy, 64. 
Ireton, General, inclines to the In- 
dependents, 547. 

his attitude toward the king, 549, 
551. 

his share in the conquest of Ire- 
land, 571. 

his body taken from the grave, 
605. 
Ironsides, their effect on the army, 

649, 5.50 ; see also Cromwell. 
Isidore, Bishop, extracts of Baeda 

from, 73. 
Italy, rise of, 802. 

jACQUELiNEof Brabant; see Glouces- 
ter, Duke Humphrey. 
Jacobins led at first by the Giron- 
dius, 766. 

their subsequent success and 
crimes, 769. 

their fall, ih. 
Jacobites, the, their plots against 
William the Third, 679. 

against Anne, 688. 

decline of their power under 
George the First, 695. 

their insurrection in 1715, 697. 

intrigued with by Cardinal Albe- 
roni, 698. 
Jaenberht, Archbishop, his plot, 
76. 

James the First, his view of di- 
vine right of kings, 471^73. 

of bishops, 473. 

his relations to Parliament, 474- 
478, 484. 

to the judges, 479. 

to his favorites, 480. 

to Europe, 480-482. 

to Bacon, 591. 
James the Second, when Duke of 
York, made Lord Admiral, 603; 
see York, James, Duke of. 

popular opinion of his character, 
(M4. 

servility of his first Parliament, 
ib. 

his approval of cruelties after 
Sedgemoor, 645. 

his relations with Lewis the Four- 
teenth, 646. 

fills his army with Roman Cath- 
olic officers, 647. 

his attacks on the Church, 647, 
648. 

his struggle with the bishops, 650, 
651. 

his flight and deposition, 660, 661. 
James, William, a Lollard, 258. 
Jarrow, the monk of; see Bseda. 
Jeffrey edits Edinburgh Review, 
790. 



INDEX. 



815 



Jeffreys, Jndge, his "Bloody Cir- 
cuit," 645. 
his advice about the Seven Bish- 
ops, 651. 
Jenkins, his ear, 703. 
Jesnits, their success in England, 
411, 412 ; see Campian and Par- 
sons. 
x-Jews, their relations with William 
the First, 115. 
their position iu England at the 

Conquest, ib. 
persecutions of, 223, 224. 
banished by Edward the First, 

224. 
restored by Cromwell, 578. 
Joan of Arc, career of, 28S-293. 
Jocelyn, Bishop of Wells under 

John, 123. 
John, the old Saxon, 83. 
John, King of England, his conspir- 
acy agaiust Henry the Second, 
139. 
his treachery to Eichard, ib. 
his character and policy, 147-149. 
his attitude toward the Pope In- 
nocent III., 149. 
his attitude toward the nobles, 

150. 
his reception of the demands of 

the nobles, 152. 
his attitude after Magna Charta, 

154, 155. 
his death, 155. 

his treatment of Ireland, 441, 442. 
Johnson, Samuel, a fi-iend of 

Burke's, 761. 
Johnston of Warriston suggests 
the renewal of the Covenant, 
519. 
Jonson, Ben, his account of Spen- 
ser's death, 427. 
his view of Shakspere's charac- 
ter, 431. 
of his readiness in writing, ih. 
"Every Man in his Humor," 433. 
succeeds Shakspere as king of 

the stage, 437. 
his estimate of Bacon, 592. 
friendship for Hobbes, 600. 
Joseph the Second of Austria, mo- 
tive and character of his policy, 
754. 
his death, 761. 
Justiciar, appointment of, 124. 
Junto, the Whig, 675. 
Junius, prosecution of, 734. 

his letters, 738. 
Jutes, their position in England, 
39. 
their invasion of England, 45. 
their Kentish kingdom ; see Kent. 
Jiison, Bishop, made . Treasurer, 
501. 

Kebel, execution of, 122. 
Kent, rise of kingdom of, 53. 

struggles with Northumbria, ih. 

insurrection of, against Mercia, 
76. 

subjection of, to Wessex, 770. 

revolts against Odo of Bayeux, 
110, HI. 
Kent, Earl of, his execution, 233. 
Kepler, a contemporary of Bacon, 

Killiecrankie, battle of, 663. 
Kingship, English, change in its 

character, 89. 
KnoUes, his history of the Turks, 

402. 



Knollys, his opinion of Mary Stu- 
art, 388. 
Knox, his resistance to Mary, ih. 

Laboukdonnaib, General, in India, 

721. 
Laborers, Statutes of; see Peasant- 
ry- 
Lally, General, his defeat, 745. 
Lambert, General, employed by 
Fairfax, 553. 
resigns his commission to Crom- 
well, 577. 
his conduct after Cromwell's 

death, 581. 
exempted from the general par- 
don, 604. 
Lambeth, treaty of, 156. 
Lancaster, Thomas, Earl of, his re- 
lations with Gaveston, 226, 227. 
his defeat and death, 227, 228. 
Lancaster, Duke of; see Gaunt, 

John of. 
Lancaster, House of; see Henry the 

Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth. 
Land, tenure of, by Norman barons 

after Conquest, 113, 114. 
Lanfrauc, of Pavia, enters the Ab- 
bey of Bee, 102. 
opposes William, 106. 
banished from Normandy, ib. 
becomes William's chief adviser, 

ih. 
summoned to England, 114. 
his reforms ; see Church of En- 
gland, 
assists Kufus to gain the crown, 

117. 
effect of his death, 118. 
Laugton, Stephen, 149, 152. 
his suspension from his archbish- 
opric, 155. 
Lis attitude in Henry the Third's 
reign, 166. 
Langton, Simon, his advice to the 

Barons, 155. 
Langton, Walter, Bishop of Worces- 
ter, 322. 
Latimer, Lord, removed from office, 

250. 
Latimer, Hugh, studies at Padua, 
321. 
his autobiography, 336, 353. 
his preaching, 358, 359. 
his tirst arrest, 359. 
made Bishop of Worcester, ih. 
his treatment of a figure of the 

Virgin, 360. 
imprisoned and deposed, 361. 
arrested under Six Articles Act, 

363. 
imprisoned on Mary's accession, 

368. 
his execution, 373. 
Latitudinarians, growth of, 598-600. 
Laud, his intolerance, 465. 
his list of ministers, 487. 
his character and policy, 498-502. 
his treatment of Scotland, 511-514. 
his feelings about "Thorough," 

516. 
his courage, 517. 
imprisonment of, 524. 
check on his power, 607. 
Lauderdale, Lord, his rule in Scot- 
land, 616. 
Lauzun, his taunt against the Irish 

defenders of Limerick, 670. 
Law, Roman, its influences in Ed- 
ward the First's reign, 204. 
Laws, the, as an authority, 84, 93. 



Layamon, his poem, 147. 

Legh, commissiouer aboutthemon- 

asterici^, 348. 
Leicester, Earl of; see Montfort, Si- 
mon de. 
Leicester, Earl of, Elizabeth's fa- 
vorite, 307, 376, 380, 381. 
Leighton the Puritan, 515. 
Leiinox, Duke of, presents petitior s 
against English Prayer- Book 
in Scotland, 517. 
Lenthall, his answer to Charles the 

First, 531. 
Leo the Tenth, his election, 322. 

his view of Luther, 331. 
Leopold, the Emperor, interferes 

against France, 7C6. 
Leofwine, son of Godwine, 109. 
Leslie, (Jeneral, takes command of 
Scotch force, 519. 
conduct at Dunbar, 559. 
taken prisoner at Worcester, 561. 
Lewes, battle of ; see Battles. 
Lewis the Seventh of ITrauce, his 
struggle with Henry the Sec- 
ond, 133. 
Lewis, son of Philip Augustus, af- 
terward Lewis the Eighth ; his 
invasion of England, 155. 
his retreat from England, 156. 
Lewis the Ninth, his decision about 
the Provisions of Oxford, 179. 
his influence on Edward the 
First, 204. 
Lewis the Fourteenth, his indig- 
nation at William of Orange's 
marriage, 630. 
his pensions to Charles the Sec- 
ond, 631. 
effect on his position of the treaty 

of Nimeguen,i&. 
his relations with James the Sec- 
ond, 646. 
his revocation of the Edict cf 

Nantes, ib. 
his character, 652. 
his policy, 653, 654. 
his war against the allies, 662. 
his intrigues about ihe Spanish 

succession, 679, 680. 
his treachery to William the 
Third, 679, 680; see also Hol- 
land, William of Orange, Ar- 
lington, Dover, treaty of. 
Lewis the Fifteenth, the freedom of 
opinion in France under him, 
759. 
Lewis the Sixteenth convokes the 
States-General, 760. 
accepts the Constitution, 761. 
flies from Paris, 766. 
his imprisonment, 767. 
his death, 768. 
Lewis the Eighteenth, his flight 

from Paris, 793. 
Leyton, Commissioner of Monas- 
teries, 348. 
Lilburne, John, 545, 557. 
Lilla saves Eadwiue from a mur- 
derer, 55. 
Lilly, an Oxford scholar, 322. 
Limerick, siege of, 670. 
Linacre of Oxford, 316, 318. 
Lincoln, in time of Romans, 42. 
Jews' houses at, 115. 
Stephen defeated at, 129. 
welcomes the barons, 152. 
Lincoln, Bishop of, his relations 
with University of Oxford, IGl, 
Lindisfarne, bishopric of, 58. 
desertion of it by Colman, 64. 



816 



INDEX. 



Liudisfarne, Cuthbert becomes its 
bishop, 6S. 
its historical importance, 69. 
Lisle, Lady, executed, G45. 
Literature, English ; see England, 

literature o"f. 
Literature, Welsh, in twelfth and 

thirteenth centuries, 1S3, ISS. 
Liverpool, Lord, his ministry, 788, 

789. 
Livery companies ; see Companies, 

Livery. 
Llewelyn of Wales, his alliance with 

Faukes de Breaute, 166. 
Llewelyn -ap-Jorwerth, his strug- 
gles for independence, 18T, 190. 
Llewelyn - ap - Gruffydd, his strug- 
gles for independence, 1ST, 190. 
Llywarch Hen; see Literature, 

Welsh. 
Locke, John, his political teaching, 

601, 602. 
Lollardry, revival of, and its sup- 
pression, 240. 
meaning of name, 25T. 
struggle of, 257, 258. 
later phases of, 272-274. 
protection of, by Kichard the Sec- 
ond, 276. 
persecution of, by Henry the 
Fourth and Henry the Fifth, 
278, 279. 
state of, in Henry the Sixth's 

reign, 287, 288. 
signs of its extinction, 295. 
persecution of, its effect on Hen- 
ry the Sixth, 296. 
effect of Oldcastle's execution on, 
280. 
Lothian becomes abode of Scotch 

kings, 87. 
Loudon, its early commerce, 43. 
plundered by Danes, 78. 
relations of Normans and French 

to, 120. 
shares in the religious revival of 

the twelfth century, 123, 124, 
welcomes Stephen, 129. 
supports him,ii&. 
welcomes the barons, 152. 
faithful to Protestantism on 

Mary's accession, 368. 
its sympathy with the Long Par- 
liament, 528-532. 
London, John of, a pupil of Eoger 

Bacon, 163. 
Londonderry, foundation of, 452. 

siege of, 665, 666. 
Lougchamp, William, Bishop of 
Ely, makes an alliance between 
Otho and Richard, 140. 
Longland, William, his history, 269, 
270. 
his poem, 270, 271. 
Lords, House of, weakened by sup- 
pression of mitred abbots, 356 ; 
see also Parliament. 
Louis Philippe, 798. 
Luddites, riots of, 796. 
Luneville, treaty of, 779. 
Luther, his change of attitude, 331. 
his relation to the Revival of Let- 
ters, 331, 332. 
reception of his doctrines in En- 
gland, 331 ; see Leo, More, 
advises Tyndale to translate the 
Bible, 357. 
Ludlow, General, his share in the 

conquest of Ireland, 571. 
Luttrell, Colonel, 738. 
Lydgate,bis character as a poet,306. 



Lyly, his " Euphues," 403. 

Lyons, William, removed from 

court, 250. 
Lytteltou leaves Long Parliament, 

532. 

MABtNOGI, 184. 

Mackay, General, his struggle 
against Dundee, 663. 

Mackintosh, Sir James, his excla- 
mation about the state of Eu- 
rope under Bonaparte, 780, 781. 
helps in Edinburgh Review, 790. 

Magdalen College ; see Parker, Gif- 
fard. Hough, etc. 

Maine submits to Duke William, 
106. 

Major-generals, Cromwell's, 576. 

Malcolm, his submission to Wil- 
liam the First, 112. 
to Rufns, 119. 

Malger, Archbishop of Rouen, 106. 

Malpighi helps to found vegetable 
physiology, 597. 

Malta, treatment of, by England, 
779, 780. 

Man conquered by Eadwine, 56. 

Manchester, its Toryism iu 1745, 
714. 

Manchester, Earl of, leads Parlia- 
mentary forces, 535. 
Cromwell quarrels with, 538; see 
also Cromwell. 

Mandeville, Lord, a leader of the 
Presbyterians, 529. 

Manny, Walter de, 245, 263. 

Mansel, a royal favorite of Henry 
the Third, 172. 

Mantes, burning of, by William the 
First, 117. 

Mauton, his scheme of Protestant 
comprehension, 619. 

Mareschal, Earl William, his pow- 
er on death of John, 155, 156. 

Mareschal, Earl Richard, his re- 
sistance to Henry, 169. 

Margaret of Anjou, her marriage, 
299. 

Marlborough, Duke of, his exploits 
in Ireland, 670. 
his plots against William the 

Third, 672. 
his early career and character, 

680, 681. 
his rise in power under Anne, 

682, 683. 
wins Blenheim, 685, 686. 
the rest of his career, 686-091. 
his opinion of Walpole, 692. 

Marlborough, Duchess of, her in- 
fluence over Anne, 681, 682. 
over her husband, 6S1. 

Marlowe, 429, 430. 

Marmont, Marshal, 788. 

Marsh, Adam, his reputation as a 
scholar, 174. 
his relations to Grosseteste and 
De Montfort, 175. 

Marshall, a Presbyterian minister, 
529. 

Marston, a successor of Shakspere, 
434. 

Marston Moor ; ses Battles. 

Martyu, Henry, 558, 564. 

Martin Marprelate, 467. 

Martin, a Papal legate driven from 
England, 170. 

Martyrs; see Latimer, Taylor, Rid- 
ley, Cranmer, etc. 

Martyr, Peter, burning of his 
bones, 374. 



Mary Tudor set aside by Edward, 
367. 
her marriage, ib. 
her courage at the insurrection, 

369. 
her policy, 370. 
discontent with her rule, 374. 
her death, 375. 
Mary Stuart, her birth, effects of, 
386. 
her claims, ib. 
her character, 387, 388. 
her marriage and its effects, 390- 

392. 
her career in England, 393-395, 
her death, 417, 41S. 
Mary, wife of William the Third, 
the hopes of Whigs from her, 
651. 
Masham, Mrs., 691. 
Massachusetts, attacks on the lib- 
erty of, 740. 
Massena, Marshal, 786. 
Massinger contrasted with Beu 

Jouson, 437. 
Massey made Dean of Christ 

Church, 648. 
Matilda of Flanders, her marriage, 
106. 
dispute about it with the Pope, 
ib. 
Matilda, wife of Henry the First, 

119, 120. 
Maud, Henry's daughter, loved by 
him, 125. 
her struggle with Stephen, 129. 
Maurice, Prince, his successes iu 

Devonshire, 535, 
Maurilius takes the place of Malger 

as Archbishop of Rouen, 106. 
May, his account of the atrocities 

of the Irish, 527. 
May-Jlou'er, the, its voyage, 497, 
Mayne, Cuthbert, execution of, 411. 
Mazarin, Cardinal, his alliance 

with Cromwell, 575. 
Medicis, Catherine de, her position 

in France, 414. 
Mediua-Sidouia leads the Armada, 

420. 
Melbourne, Lord, his ministry, 798. 
Mellitus, Bishop of London, 57. 
Melville, his treatment of James 

the First, 512. 
Mercia, colonization of, 52. 
Paganism of, 57. 
shakes off the overlordship of 

Northumbria, ib. 
Chad's mission to, 60. 
its conquests in time of Peuda, 

59, 60, 
effect on, of Theodore's arrange- 
ments, 66, 
great progress of, in latter part 

of seventh century, 67, 68. 
rise of, after fall of Northumbria, 

70-72. 
power of, under Offa, 74-76. 
its fall, 77. 
victories over Danes under 

^thelred, 84. 
its relations to Wales, 184, 185. 
Meres, Francis, "Wit's Treasury," 
432. 
his opinion of Shakspere, 434. 
Methodists, the, 708-710. 
Mexico, attack of Prance on, 802. 
Middleton as successor of Shaks- 
pere, 434. 
Middle-English ; see English, their 
settlements iu Britain. 



INDEX. 



817 



Middlesex election ; see Wilkes, 

Luttrell. 
Milton, John, his Puritanism, 459, 
460. 
his early career, 514. 
his first poems, 515, 510. 
his "Lycidas," 51S. 
his sonnet on Massacre of Vau- 

dois, 575. 
his career as illustrative of Puri- 
tanism, 582, 5S3. 
"Paradise Lost" and "Paradise 
Regained" and " Samson Agu- 
nistes,"5S4, 5S5. 
efforts for freedom of the press, 
642. 
Monasteries, rise of, in Northum- 

bria, 62. 
Monks, attacks of Erasmus, Colet, 
Thomas Cromwell, More, on, 
34S. 
Monk, General, reduces the High- 
lauds, 571. 
circumstances of his restoration 
of Charles the Second, 5S1. 
Monmouth, Duke of, brought for- 
ward by Shaftesbury, 636. 
his progress through the coun- 
try, 63S. 
his arrest, 640. 
his flight, 641. 

his insurrection, defeat, and 
death, 044, C45. 
Moore, Sir John, his career in Port- 
ugal, 7S4, 785. 
Montacute besieged, 111. 
Montagu, his sermons before Par- 
liament, 4S7. 
Montagu, made Earl of Sandwich 

by Charles the Second, 603. 
Montagu, a member of Whig Jun- 
to, 675. 
becomes Chancellor of Excheq- 
uer, ih. 
his financial reforms, ib. 
driven from office, 678. 
Montaigne, point of similarity be- 
tween him and Shakspere, 
436. 
IMontcalm, General, 724, 725. 
Monteagle, Lord, the letter to, 470. 
Montesquieu, his account of relig- 
ious state of England, 707. 
his work in Prance, 773. 
Montfort, Simon de, his relations 
to the Roman Church, 171. 
the King's fear of him, 175. 
his career in Gascony, 176. 
his share in the Provisions of 

Oxford, 177, 178. 
his siege of Dover, 178. 
the rest of his career, 179-182. 
his admiration for Edward the 
First, 203. 
Montgomery, minister of William, 
113. 
receives grants of manors, ib. 
Montrose, Earl of, his desertion of 
the patriots, 527. 
organizes a rising in favor of 

Charles the First, .536. 
defeats Argyle, 542, 543. 
Moravians, Wesley's relations with, 

709. 
More, Mrs. Hannah, her account of 
absence of Bibles in England, 
707. 
effect of her writing, 710. 
More, Sir Thomas, his allusion to 
Vespucci, 315. 
his character, 31S. 



More, Sir Thomas, his opinion of 
Colet's school, 322. 
his career, 325-327. 
his "Utopia," 327-330. 
his answer to Luther, 331, 332. 
his opinion of Wolsey, 335. 
as Chancellor, 342. 
hie attacks on the monks, 34S. 
his death, 352. 

influence of his doctrines, 599. 
Morkere of Northumbria, supports 
Eadgar the ^theling, 110. 
reduced to submission by Wil- 
liam, 111. 
Morrison, Robert, a botanist, 597. 
Mortimer, Roger, his career, 233. 
Mortimer, House of, its claims in 
the Lancastrian times, 281, 285. 
Moscow, retreat of, 788. 
Mountjoy, his rule in Ireland, 451. 
Mountmorris, his treatment by 

Weutworth, 508. 
Mowbray, Roger, rewarded by 
William the First with grants 
of lands, 113. 
Mowbray, Earl of Northumber- 
land, captured by Rufus, 118. 
Murray, Earl of, leads the Lords of 
the Congregation, 390. 
made Regent, 392. 
Mutiny Act ; see Statutes. 

Napoleox ; see Bonaparte. 
Nelson, Admiral ; see Battles, Ville- 

neuve. 
Newcastle, Duke of, his ignorance 
of the intrigues of Austria and 
Russia, 715. 
his incapacity, 716. 
his corruption, 717. 
his quarrel with Pitt, 730. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, his work, 597. 
Newton, the Evangelical, 710. 
Nimeguen, Treaty of, 631. 
Non-conformists, effect on, of the 
St. Bartholomew's Day of 1662, 
607, 608; see Presbyterians, 
Methodists, Quakers. 
Norfolk, Earl of, rebels against 
William the First, 116 ; see also 
Bigod, Earl. 
Norfolk, Duke of, his share in Hen- 
ry the Eighth's divorce, 342. 
arrests Thomas Cromwell, 363. 
his expectations from the Em- 
peror, 364. 
Norfolk, Duke of, his treason 

against Elizabeth, 395. 
Norfolk, Duke of, his answer to 

James the Second, 649. 
Normandy described, 100, 101. 
civilization of, 101. 
condition of, under William, 106. 
conquest of, by Henry the Fifth, 
2S2, 283. 
Normans, settlement of, in France, 
101. 
conquests of, 103, 104. 
blending of, with England; see 
English. 
North, Lord, his protest against 
cruelties of James the Second, 
644. 
North, Lord, in George the Third's 
time, his servility to the king, 
737. 
stirred up by Clive to inquire 

into India, 745. 
his resignation, 748. 
its effect, ih. 
his coalition with Fox, 751 ; see 



North, liordi— Continued. 

also America, Boston, Massa- 
chusetts. 

Northallerton ; see Battles. 

Northampton, Treaty of, 233. 

Northampton, John of, 273. 

Northumberland, Earl of, in Henry 
the Fourth's reign, his rising 
and that of his scm, 279. 
in Henry the Eighth's reign, re- 
bels, 353. 

Northumberland, Duke of. his ca- 
reer, 367, 308. 

Northumberland, Earl of, rebels 
against Elizabeth, 394. 
efi'ect of her treatment of him, 
395. 

Northumbria, establishment of a 
kingdom there, 52. 
history of it till its conversion, 

53-57. 
its fall, 70. 

its anarchy after its fall, 74 ; see 
also ^thelfrith, JEthelbert, 
Eadwine, Cuthbert, Oswald, 
Oswi, Whitby, Bseda, Cjedraon. 

Norwich, separate French colony 
in, 120. 

Nothelm, his assistance to Basda, 
73. 

Nottingham, Lord, his opposition 
to Marlborough, 686. 

Nottingham, peace of, 79. 

Nowell, Dean, Elizabeth's treat- 
ment of him, 384. 

Noy, his revival of ship-money, 
506. 

Oates, Titus, his plot, 631-633. 

his pension, 668. 
O'Brien, Smith, his insurrection, 

800. 
Occleve as a poet, 306. 
Ockham, William of, his rank as a 
school-man, 174. 
his efi'ect on Wyclif, 251. 
O'Connell, Daniel, his agitation for 
Catholic Emancipation, 798. 
effect of his violence, ib. 
his "Repeal" agitation, 799. 
his arrest, 800. 
Oda, Archbishop, makes peace with 

Danelagh, 86. 
Odo of Bayeux left iu charge of En- 
gland, 110. 
his tyranny, 110, 111. 
rewarded by a grant of manors, 

113. 
rebels against William, 116. 
his arrest, ib. 
rebels against Rufns, 117. 
Offit, king of Mercia, his rule, 74-76. 
his relations with Charles the 
Great, 76. 
Oglethorpe, General, founds Geor- 
gia, 726. 
Oldcastle, Sir John, 280. 
O'Neills, the, 449, 450. 
Orangemen, their cruelties in Ire- 
land, 77.5. 
Ordericus Vitalis, as an authority, 

100, 103, 110. 
Orleans, Duke of, his intrigues in 

France, 280. 
Orleans, siege of; see Joan of Arc. 
Ormond invites Charles the First 
to Ireland, 556. 
made Duke and Steward by 
Charles the Second, 603. 
Orosius, translation of, by jElfred, 
83. 



818 



INDEX. 



Oswald, Kin;^ of Northnmbria, 57. 
calls missiouaries unto North- 

umbria, 58. 
effect of his victories, 64. 
Oswi, King of Northumbiia, CO. 
effect of his victories, G4. 
presides at the Synod of Whitby, 
C4, C5. 
Otho, the Emperor, his alliance 

with John at Bouviues, 151. 
Otho, the Papal legate, ITO. 
Oxford, medical school of Jews at, 
115. 
Matilda's escape from, 129. 
Oxford, University of, its early his- 
tory, 156. 
lectures of Vacarius at, 157. 
description of its early appear- 
ance, 157-160. 
Normans and Gascons come to, 

after divisions at Paris, 160. 
Chancellor of, his position in the 

thirteenth century, 161. 
takes place of University of Par- 
is, 251. 
Provisions of, 177-179. 
the centre of Lollardry, 257. 
degeneracy of learning at, in the 

fifteenth century, 306. 
its zeal for Charles the First, 534. 
Oxford, Earl of, Henry the Sev- 
enth's treatment of him, 314. 
Oxford, Earl of, Burleigh's son- 
in-law, turns Eomau Catholic, 
412. 

PAPtTA, importance of its Univer- 
sity in the thirteenth century, 
160. 
Paine, Thomas, Pitt's opinion of 

him, 770. 
Palmerston, Lord, his career, 799, 

801, 803. 
Paris, University of, its importance 
in the thirteenth centurv, 158, 
160. 
dissensions in, 160. 
its reputation transferred to Ox- 
ford, 251. 
treatment of, in Cranmer's can- 
vass, 343. 
Paris, Treaty of, 748. 
Paris, city of, rules France in 179-3, 

767. 
Parish, origin of, 06. 
Parker, Matthew, made Archbish- 
op of Canterbury, 383. 
his object, 384. 
his effect on the clergy, ih. 
his enforcement of uniformity, 
464-466. 
Parker, the Roman Catholic presi- 
dent of Magdalen College, 648. 
Parliaments, rise of, 191, 194-197. 
position of, in time of Edward 

the Third, 247-251. 
attacks of, on the Pope, 252. 
decline of, under Lancastrians ; 

s«e Commons, House of. 
claims of, to regulate succession 
after fall of Henry the Sixth, 
297. 
importance of, under Edward the 

Fourth, 302. 
their relations with the Tudors, 

405-408. 
their feelingabout Protestantism, 

368, 415. 
their struggle against James the 

First, 476-478,'"4S2-4S4. 
their struggle against Charles 



Parliaments— Contrnwet?. 

the First; see Eliot, Pym, 
Hampdeu, Weutworth, etc. 
"the Drunken Parliament" in 

Edinburgh, 616. 
reports of debates in them, 739. 
of Lelaud ; see Ireland. 
Acts of; see Statutes. 
Parsons, the Jesuit, 412. 
Paston, letters of, 307. 
Paterson suggests schemes of a 

national bank, 675. 
Patrick, his mission to Ireland, 

58. 
"Patriots," the, oppose Walpole, 

702. 
Pauliuus goes to Northumbria, 55. 
his conversion of Eadwine, 56. 
his flight from Northumbria, 57. 
Peasantry, revolt of; see Tyler, 
Wat. 
condition of, in early times, 200. 
first alterations in their condi- 
tion, 261, 202. 
their struggle to attain a higher 

condition, 202, 203. 
effect on them of Statutes of La- 
borers, 263, 204. 
John Ball preaches to them ; see 

Ball, John, 
subsequent struggles of, after 
Tyler's time, 271, 272. 
Peckham, Archbishop, his reputa- 
tion as a scholar, 174. 
Peel, Sir Robert, supports the Wel- 
lington Ministry, 798. 
becomes Prime Minister, ih. 
his policy about free trade, 800. 
Pelhams, the, contrasted with Wal- 
pole, 702. 
Pelham, Henry, his rise, 712. 
his fall, 716. 
gives Pitt ofiice, ?6. 
Peucriche, Richard, a teacher in 
reign of Edward the Third, 
236. 
Penda, his struggle against North- 
umbria, 57, 59, 60. 
Penn, William, colonizes Pennsyl- 
vania, 726. 
Pepys, his account of the change 
of feeling toward Cromwell in 
England, 613. 
his opinion of Charles the Sec- 
ond, ib. 
of the Triple Alliance, 620. 
of Shaftesbury, 625. 
Perceval, Spencer, becomes Prime 
Minister, 785. 
his resistance to America, 787. 
his assassination, 788. 
Perren, Alice, her influence at 
court of Edward the Third, 
250. 
Perth, convention of, 229. 
Peterborough, abbey of, founded 
by Wulfere, 67. 
burned by Danes, 79. 
Peters, Hugh, his justification of 

Pride's Purge, 554. 
Petition, Millenary, 471. 

of Right, 491, 492. 
Petitioners and abhorrers, 038. 
Petre, Father, called to Privy Coun- 
cil, 649. 
Petty, Sir William, an economist, 

596. 
Pevensey, William lands at, 108. 
Philip Augustus, his relations with 
John, 139. 
his effect on Arthur's cause, 141. 



Philip the Second of Spain, his 
marriage ; see Mary, 
perceives hopelessness of perse- 
cution in England, 374. 
puzzled at Elizabeth's power. 

376. 
Elizabeth's use of, 381. 
his character as a statesman, 413. 
Philips, Sir Robert, his speeches 

against Charles the First, 487. 
Picts, the, 43. 
their league with the Britons, 44. 
their defeat by the English, 40. 
Piers the Ploughman, visions of, 

254 ; see also Longland. 
"Pilgrimage of Grace," 353. 
Pilnitz, conference of, 766. 
Pitt, William, the elder leads the 
"Boys," 704. 
his career in ofiice, 716-721. 
eft'ects of it, 725. 

effects of his assistance to Fred- 
erick, 728. 
George the Second's dislike of 

him, 729. 
his fall, 730. 

his refusal to return to office, 735. 
approves the resistance of Amer- 
ica, 735 ; see also Chatham, Earl 
of. 
Pitt, William, the younger, his first 
appearance in Parliament, 750. 
moves for Parliamentary reform, 

750. 
his struggle against the coalition, 

751 752 
his ludiaBill, 752. 
his treatment of Warren Hastings, 

753. 
compared with Walpole, 754. 
his answer to Fox about his pol- 
icy toward France, 754. 
his financial policy, 754-757. 
failure of his bill for Parliament- 
ary Reform, 757. » 
his attitude about the slave-trade, 

758. 
about the regency, 700. 
about the French Revolution and 

about Prussia, 700, 761. 
his hopes from France, 703. 
his opposition to Burke, 763-705. 
supports Fox's Libel Bill, 704. 
defeats plots of the French emi- 
grants, 765, 700. 
struggles for peace, 707, 703, 
his change of policy, 782. 
attempts to make peace with 
■ Prance, 770. 
his relations with Ireland, 772- 

778. 
with the peerage, 776, 777. 
with the Roman Catholics, 778, 

779. 
his resignation, 779. 
his death, 782. 
Plagues in Charles the Second's 
time, 613 ; see also Black Death. 
Plantagenet, origin of the name, 

128. 
Poggio, his view of English litera- 
ture, 300. 
Poland, relation of, to Protestant- 
ism, 469. 
divisions of, 760, 769. 
Pole, Michael de la, Earl of Suffolk, 

274. 
Pole Reginald, his view of Henry 
the Eighth's character, 319. 
his advice to Wolsey, 344. 
made Cardinal, 354. 



INDEX. 



819 



Pollock, General, his Affghan expe- 
dition, SOO. 
Poor ; see Statutes, Peasantry. 
Poor Law Keforra, 799. 
Pope, claims of, on England, 115. 
attacks of Ockham and Wyclif 
on, 252-254. 
Porter, Jobn, in Bonner's time, 

455. 
Portsmouth, Dnchess of, supports 
the exclusion Bill, 639. 
her presence at Charles the Sec- 
ond's death-bed, 643, 644. 
Portreeve, his position in time of 

Henry the First, 121. 
Portugal, relations of, with Spain 
and England, 620. 
treatment of, at treaty of Fon- 

tainebleau, 784. 
Wellesley's opinion of, 785. 
Wellesley's campaign in, ib. 
Prsemunh'e, Statute of: see Statutes. 
Pragmatic Sanction, 700. 
Prague, University of, Wyclif's 
writings brouarht to it ; see 
Wyclif. 
Preshyterianism, attitude of lead- 
ers of Long Parliament to it, 
462, 463. 
treatment of, in Scotland by 

Laud, 511-514. 
growth of, 529. 
Presbyterians, struggle against the 
Independents, 546-552. 
their relations with Usher, 605. 
effect of their expulsion from 

Church of England, 607. 
their attitude at time of Scotch 
Act of Union, 68S. 
Press, liberty of, attacked by Gran- 
ville, 784. 
growth of its power, 739. 
Pretender, the old, 690. 
Pretender, the young, 713, 714. 
Pride, Colonel, his Purge, 554. 
Prior, Matthew, his satires on the 

Allies, 690. 
Protestants ; see Lollardry, Lati- 
mer, Cromwell (Thomas), Cran- 
mer. 
Elizabeth's attitude toward, 37T, 

379, 780, 382. 
growth of their position in Eliz- 
abeth's reign, 408, 409. 
growth of their clergy, 409. 
Provisors ; see Statutes. 
Protestantism, history of, during 

Elizabeth's reign,"46S, 469. 
Prussia, relations of, with England, 
760, 761. 
its army under Blucher defeated 
by Napoleon, 793. 
Prynne, his "Histriomastrix,"516. 

his trial and punishment, 5i7. 
Pulteuey leads opposition to Wal- 
pole, 702. 
becomes Earl of Bath, 712. 
Puritans, their first settlement in 
America, 49.5. 
their ideal, 587. 

their wish for uniformity of be- 
lief, 608. 
their inhuence on the United 
States, 727. 
Puritanism, its effect on England, 
404. 
its growth in Elizabethan times, 

436. 
hatred of its professors for the 

stage, 437, 438. 
its effect on the people, 450-462. 



Puritanism, distinct from Presby- 
teriauisni, 462, 463 ; see also 
Laud. 

fall of, 579-5S5. 

causes of its fall, 589, 590. 

its effect on the history of En- 
gland, 758, 759. 
Pym, his feelings toward Episcopa- 
cy, 462. 

his lirst election, 478. 

his speech about the Petition of 
Eight, 492. 

his character and position, 522, 
523. 

brings in the Solemn Kemon- 
strance, 528. 

his views on Church reform, 529. 

attempted arrest of, 530, 531. 

his attitude after Charles the 
First's attempt to arrest five 
members, 532. 

determines to ally the Long Par- 
liament with Scotland, 530. 

his last plaus, 53T, 538. 

effect of his death on Cromwell's 
position, 539. 

his body taken from the grave, 
606. 

his influence on Finance, 701. 

QiTADKTiPLE Allianok, the, 698. 
Quakers, the, protected by Crom- 
well, 573. 
their assertion of freedom of be- 
lief, 60S. 
special persecution of them, 609. 
Quo warranto, writs of, 222. 

E^nwALD, King of East-Anglia, 53. 
his inconsistency iu religion, 57. 
his whimsical opposition to Chris- 
tianity, ih. 
Rahere builds St. Bartholomew's 

priory, 123. 
Eaikes, his Sunday-schools, 710. 
Raleigh, Sir Walter, "History of 
the World," 402. 
his account of Spenser, 424. 
failure of his last expedition, 481. 
his discovery of Virginia, tobacco, 
and potatoes, 490. 
Ray, John, his scientific works, 597. 
Reform of Parliament; see Com- 
mons, House of. 
Reformation, its effect in separa- 
ting oft" the English Church 
from others, 607. 
Remonstrance, the Short, 492, 494, 
495. 
the Solemn, 528. 
Repyngdon, his sermons, 257. 
Reiesby, his opinion of Charles the 

Second, 037. 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, his friendship 

for Burke, 701. 
Rich, Edmund, story of, 159, 100. 
his support of the Earl Mareschal, 
169. 
Richborough, fortress of, 45. 
Richard the First of England, his 
character, 139. 
his policy, 140. 

his treatment of Scotland, 208. 
Richard the Second, effect of his 
accession, 265. 
his attitude in Tyler's insurrec- 
tion, 267, 268. 
after it, 268. 
takes power into his own hands, 

275, 276. 
effects of his policy, 276, 



Richard the Second, his fall, 27T. 

his treatment of Ireland, 442. 
Richard the Third, his seizure of 
the throne, 311. 
his policy, 311, 312. 
his death, 312. 
Richard the Tearless, Duke of Nor- 
mandy, 101. 
Richardson, Chief- Justice, Laud's 

quarrel with, 500. 
Richelieu, effects of his policy, 652, 

653. 
Richmond, Duke of, his advocacy 

of universal suffrage, 750. 
Ridley, his execution, 373. 
Rivers, Earl, his literary ability, 

310. 
Rizzio, his career, 390. 
Robert Guiscard, 103. 
Robert, Duke of Normandy, 104. 

his pilgrimage, ib. 
Robert, son of William the First, 
rebels against his father, 117. 
Normandy bequeathed to, ib. 
continual rebellion iu his name 

against Rufus, ib. 
sells Normandy to Rufus, 118. 
goes to Crusades, 119. 
liis return, ib. 

heads a rebellion agaiust Henry 
the First, 124. 
Robert of Belesme rebels against 

Henry the First, ib. 
Robespierre, Maximilian, opposes 
war, 766. 
his fall, 769. 
Robinson, John, the Separatist, 466. 

his voyage, 497. 
Rochelle, fall of, 493. 
Rochester, siege of, by William Ru- 
fus, 117. 
Rochester, Lord, his profligate 

poems, 588. 
Rochester, Bishopric of, what it 

represented, 65. 
Rockingham, Lord, inclines to Pitt, 
733. 
his ministry, 735. 
his dislike of Parliamentary re- 
form, 738. 
makes peace, 750. 
his death, 751. 
effect of his reforms, ih. 
Rodney, Admiral, effect of his vic- 
tory, 74S. 
Roger deToesney, a Norman lead- 
er, 103,105. 
Roger of Howden as a chronicler, 

144. 
Roger, Guiscard's brother, 104. 
Rogers, execution of, 372. 
Rohese, mother of Beket, 131. 
Rolf the Ganger, his conquests in 

France, 101. 
Rome, relations of, with Britain, 
43,44. 
influence of, in Church, 64-68. 
Romney secured by William the 

Conqueror, 109. 
Romsey, Matilda, educated in nun- 
nery at, 119. 
Rookwood, Elizabeth, treatment of, 

411. 
Rossbach, battle of; see Battles. 
Rousseau expresses moral concep- 
tions of his time, 759. 
Royal Society founded, 59T. 
Rudyard, Sir Benjamin, his hopes 

from Charles the First, 480. 
"Rump," the; see Commonwealth, 
Cromwell, Vane, Martin. 



820 



INDEX. 



Rupert, Prince, his exploits in the 

civil wars, 533, 535, 538, SiS. 

his flight after Marston Moor, 53S. 

his conduct at Naseby, 542, 543. 

Russell, family of, rise of, from the 

spoil of the monasteries, 356. 
Russell, Lord, helps to head the 

country pftrty, 623. 
Russell, Williaml^ Lord, his support 
of Shaftesbury in the Exclusion 
Bill, 636. 
his trial and execution, 641. 
Russell, Admiral, his intrigues with 
James the Second, 67'2. 
his defeat of the French at La 

Hogue, 672. 
made Secretary of the Admiralty, 
675. 
Russell, Lord John, his first minis- 
try, 800. 
his second ministry, ib. 
his desire for reform of Parlia- 
ment, 802. 
Russia, rise of, under Catherine the 
Second, 760. 
England's war with, SOI. 
Rygge, Chancellor of Oxford, 25S. 
Ryswick, Peace of, 676. 

SAOnETEKELL, Dr., 691. 

Sackville, his " Gorbeduc," 42S. 

Salisbury, John of, his holiness of 
life, 124. 
his fame at Paris, 15S. 

Salisbury, Roger of, his arrest by 
Stephen, 129. 

Salisbury, Earl of, a leader of Lol- 
lards, 276. 
his death, 2S0. 

Salisbury, Countess of, her death, 
341. 

Saint ; see St. 

Bancroft, Archbishop, protests 
against Declaration of Indul- 
gence, 650. 

San Domingo, taking of, 575. 

Sarsfield, General, iu Ireland, 670. 

Sautre, William, his execution, 279. 

Savile, Sir John, his rivalry with 
Wentworth, 508. 

Saville, Sir Henry, his dying speech, 
484. 

Savoy, Duke of, treatment of, by 
Cromwell, 675. 

Saye and Sele, Lord, a leader of the 
Presbyterians, .529. 
made Lord Privy Seal, 003. 

Sawtre ; see Sautre. 

Saxons, their settlement in En- 
gland, 39. 

Saxons, East and West, their colo- 
nies, 51 ; see also East-Saxons, 
Essex, Wessex. 

Saxons, South, their kingdom, 48. 

Schomberg, General, in Ireland, 
669. 

Scinde, annexation of, SCO. 

Scots, King of, invested with fief of 
Cumberland, 87. 

Scots, the, absorbed by English, i6. 

Scotland, its treatment by William 
the First, 117. 
struggles of, against England up 

to time of Wall^ice, 203-213. 
its state at accession of Eliza- 
beth, 384-387. 
its treatment by Laud, 511-514. 
efifect of Charles the Second's 

policy on, 616. 
its treatment by James the Sec- 
ond, 647. 



Scotland, union of, with England, 

087-689. 
Scrope, Archbishop of York, his in- 
surrection and death, 279. 
Sedley, Sir Charles, 5SS. 
Separatists, the, 465-407. 
September, Massacres of, 707. 
Serf; see Peasantry. 
Seringapatam, capture of, 771. 
Shaftesbury, Lord, his taunts 
against the Queen, 615. 
hisdiscovery of Charles's perfidy, 

624. 
his policy at court, 624-626. 
causes of his being driven from 

oflice, 626, 627. 
his subsequent policy, 627, 628. 
his first sketch of the Exclusion 

Bill, 628. 
sent to the Tower bv Danbj', 630. 
takes up the Popish"Plot, 632, 6.33. 
is made Lord Treasurer after 

Danby's fall, 633. 
his championship of Monmouth, 

636. 
his second dismissal from office, 

687. 
his later policy, 630-040. 
his Bill of Divorce, 639. 
his flight and death, 641. 
Shakspere, highest type of Eliza- 
bethan literature, 409, 423. 
scantiness of information about 

him, 430, 431. 
his "Venus and Adonis," 432. 
his dramas, 432-436. 
his symi)athy with the insurrec- 
tion of Essex, 43.5. 
George the Third's opinion of 
him, 729. 
Shane O'Neill, 449, 450. 
Shaxton, made Bishop of Salis- 
bury, 359. 
his imprisonment, 361. 
Shelburne, Lord, leads the Chat- 
ham party, 750. 
his ministry, 751. 
Sheldon, Archbishop, encourages 

buffoonery, 588. 
Sherborne, Ealhstan, Bishop of, 78. 
Sheridan, Richard Brinslcy, his 
view of Napoleon's invasion of 
Spain, 784. 
Sherifl"s, ofiice of, 195. 
Shippen, his opinion of Walpole, 

693. 
Ship-money, 503. 

Shire, Knights of, institution of, 
196-198. 
their union with the burgesses, 
248. 
Shrewsbury, foundation of, 75. 

the Norman castle at. 111. 
Shrewsbury, Earl of, intrigues with 
James the Second, 672. 
becomes Secretary of State, 675. 
Sidney, Sir Philip, his character, 
403, 404. 
his relations with Spenser, 423. 
Sidney, Sir Henry, his government 

of Ireland, 450. 
Sidney, Algernon, his inclination 
to the independents, 547. 
his trial and death, 641. 
Sikhs, risings of, 800. 
Simeon of Durham, as an authori- 
ty, 110, 143. 
Skelton, his poetry, 401. 
Slavery in Early England, 50. 
eft'orts of Church against, 89. 
trade in, abolished at Bristol, ib. 



Slavery prohibited by William Wal- 
lace, 211. 
abolished by Act of Parliament, 
815 ; see Wilberforce, Statutes. 

Sleswick, its relations with Early 
England, 39. 

Smith, John, discovers Bay of Ches- 
apeake, 496. 

Smith, Adam, his "Wealth of Na- 
tions," 755. 

Smith, Sir Sidney, defeats Bona- 
parte at Acre, 772. 

Snowdon, Lords of, 187. 

Sociuianism, its growth in Poland, 
469. 

Socinians excluded from the Par- 
liament of 1657, 57S. 

Sophia, Electress of Hanover, de- 
clared successor to the throne, 
680. 

Somers, Lord, chosen President of 
a Royal Society, 597. 
a member of the Whig Junto, 675. 
becomes Lord Keeper, ib. 
eff'ects the union between En- 
gland and Scotland, 688. 
becomes President of the Coun- 
cil, 689. 

Somersetshire, insurrection in, 
against the Normans, 111. 

Somerset, Duke of, in Henry the 
Sixth's reign, 295. 

Somerset the Protector, his acces- 
sion to power, 364. 
his fall, ib. 

Somerset, Earl of, his answer to 
James the Second, 649. 

Somerville tries to murder Eliza- 
beth, 418. 

Soult, Marshal, 7S5, 786, 791. 

Southampton, Earl of, his relations 
with Shakspere, 434. 
with the Earl of Essex, ib. 

Southampton, Earl of, in James 
the Second's time, becomes 
Lord Treasurer, 003. 

South-Saxons ; see Saxons, South. 

South-Sea Bubble, 698, 699. 

Southumbrians, the, 59. 

Southwark burned by William the 
First, 109. 

Spain, its position in Europe in 
Elizabeth's reign, 413-415. 
relations between it and England 

after the Armada, 439. 
James the First's policy toward, 

480-482. 
war between it and England in 
George the Second's time, 703, 
704. 
its treatment by Bonaparte, 7S4. 
invasion of, by Wellesley, 785 ; 
see also Philip the Second. 

Speed, his chronicles, 402. 

Spenser, Elizabeth's favor to, 370, 
379. 
his work and life, 423-427. 
his use of the Bible, 456. 
his influence on Milton, 515. 

Stafford, Lord, his execution, 639. 

Stair, Master of ; see Gleucoe, Mas- 
sacre of. 

St. Albans, chronicle of, 306. 

Stamp Act, the, 734, 735. 

Stanhope, Lord, First Lord of the 
Treasury, cause of his death, 
699. 

Star-Chnmber for Jews in William 
the First's time, 115. 
Charles the First's tise of, 505, 
508. 



INDEX. 



821 



Statutes, Petition of Commons, how 
converted into tliem, 24S, 249. 
of Appeals, 345. 
Bill of Rights, 066. 
Board of Control, Indian ; see 

Pitt. 
Boston Port Act ; see Boston. 
Conventicle Act, 609. 
Five-mile Act, ib. 
Habeas Corpus Act, 642. 
Heresies, 2TS, 2T9, 306, 3S2. 
Kilkenny, 442. 

Laborers, 203, 264 ; see also Peas- 
antry. 
Libel Act, Fox's; see Fox, 

Charles James. 
Merchants, 193. 
Monopolies, abolition of, 403. 
Mortmain, 193. 

Municipalities, Reform of, 799. 
Mutinv Act. 006. 
Poor-Laws, 396, 397. 
Prsemunire, 252. 
Proclamations, Royal, 304. 
Provisors, 252. ' 
Quia Emptores, 194. 
Reform Act, 798. 
Regulation Act, Indian, 745. 
repealed in Edward the Sixth's 

reign, 364. 
Schism Act, 094. 
Septennial Act, 697. 
Six Articles Act, 303-305. 
Slave-trade, abolition of, 783. 
Slavery, abolition of, 798. 
Stamp Act, 734. 
Test Act, 411, 006, 623, 067. 
Toleration Act, 667. 
Treasons Act, 770. 
Triennial Act, 667. 
of Uniformity iu Elizabeth's 

reign, 884. 
in Charles the Second'sreign, 600. 
of Winchester, 193. 
St. Bartholomew, Massacre of, 414. 

iu 1062 ; see Bartholomew, St. 
Stephen, King, his birth and edu- 
cation, 129. 
silences Vacarius, 157. 
Stewart, Dugald, his estimate of 

Bacon, 594. 
St. Frideswide, the priorv of, at Ox- 
ford, 158. 
St. Gall, monastery of, 5S. 
St. George, Church of the Canons 

of, at Oxford. 158. 
Stigand, Archbishop, 100. 

his deposition, 114. 
Stilliugtleet, his schemes of Prot- 
estant comprehension, 619. 
his pamphlets against supersti- 
tion, 648. 
Stirling, battle of; see Battles. 
St. John the lawyer, his comment 
on affairs in 1642, 520. 
dispatched to Holland by the 
Commonwealth, 560. 
St. John, Henry ; see Bolingbroke, 

Lord. 
Stokes, Peter, his attacks on the 

Lollards, 257. 
Stowe, his chronicles, 402. 
St. Paul's, church- yard of, when 

built, 123. 
St. Paul's, barons' meeting at, 152. 

Dean of, dies of fright, 224. 
Stafford ; see Wentworth. 
Straw, Jack, his position iu Tyler's 

insurrection, 265. 
Strickland, Elizabeth's order to, 
406. 



Strode, his view of the relations be- 
tween Long Parliament and the 
Scotch, 524. 
his attempted arrest, 530. 
Strong-bow ; see Ireland, conquest 

of. 
St. Ruth, General, 670. 
Stuart, early line of, 384, 385 ; see 
also Marj', James the First, etc. 
Suchet, General, 786. 
Sudbury, Simon de, his murder ap- 
proved by Hereford, 255, 256. 
advises the king to resist the in- 
surgents, 266. 
his death, 207. 
Suffolk, Earl of, in Henry the Sixth's 
reign, 293; see als(j Pole, Mi- 
chael de la. 
Sunderland, Lord, truckles to Duke 
of York, 040. 
threatens to swamp House of 

Lords, 650. 
his policy, 674. 
invents a " Cabinet," ib. 
sent to Vienna, 687. 
dismissed, 691. 
Snrajah Dowlah, 722. 
Sussex, Earl of, his opinion of pi'ev- 
alent state of religion iu North, 
394. 
his treatment of Shane O'Neill, 
450. 
Swegen, Danish leader, invades En- 
gland, 91. 
conquers England, 92. 
Swegen, King of Denmark, his in- 
vasion of Englaud, HI. 
Swegen, son of Godwiue, Earl of 

Mercia, 98. 
Swend, his project and death, 94. 
Swift, Jonathan, his pamphlet 

against the Allies, 090. 
SwithhuD, Bishop of Winchester, 78. 

Tacitus, his account of the Ger- 
mans, 41. 

Taillefer the Minstrel, 108. 

Talavera ; see Battles. 

Tallard, his assistance to the Allies, 
685. 

Talleyrand, his desire for war be- 
tween France and Prussia, 792, 
793. 

Tamar becomes the English front- 
ier, 77. 

Taunton, origin of, 70. 

Taylor, Rowland, his execution, 
371, 372. 

Taylor, Jeremy, his "Liberty of 
Prophecying," 599. 

Tenchebray, battle of, 124. 

Temple, Sir William, makes the 
Triple Alliance, 620. 
wishes to strengthen the Royal 

Council, 634. 
his difference with Shaftesbury 

about Monmouth, 636. 
his advice to Charles on the oc- 
casion, ib. 
supports the Exclusion Bill, 038. 

Temple, Lord, his refusal of office, 
735, 736. 

Test Act ; see Statutes. 

Thanet assigned to England, 45. 

Thegn, origin of, 90. 

Thelwall, trial of, 770. 

Theobald of Canterbury, his holi- 
ness of life, 124. 
a moral leader, 131. 

Theodore of Tarsus dispatched to 
England, 05. 



Theodore of Tarsus, his organiza- 
tion of the Church, 65, 00. 
negotiates a peace, 70. 
Thistlewood ; see Cato Street Con- 
spiracy. 
Thurstau, Archbishop of York, re- 
sists the Scots, 130. 
Tillotson, Archbishop, his scheme 
of Protestant comprehensiou, 
619. 
writes pamphlets against super- 
stition, OiS. 
Tilsit, Peace of, 783. 
Tippoo Sahib, his struggle with the 

English, 771. 
Toleration Act ; see Statutes. 
Tooke, Home ; see Home Tooke. 
"Tories," origin of the party, 638. 
their change of policy on the ac- 
cession of George" the Third, 
729. 
their support of the younger Pitt, 

753. 
govern Englaud after war with 
France, 783. • 

Tortulf the Forester, 120. 
Tostig, son of Godwiue, driven to 
Flanders, 100. 
invades England with Harald 

Hardrada, 108. 
defeated at Stamford Bridge ; see 
Battles. 
Tournameuts introduced by Ed- 
ward the First, 203. 
occasions for vice under Edward 
the Third, 253. 
Tourville, Admiral, 071, 072. 
Towns, causes of their early wealth 
and imp(U'tance, 121. 
their struggles for self-govern- 
ment, ib. ' 
Townshend, his fall, 704. 
Tresham ; see Gunpowder Plot. 
Triennial Act ; see Statutes. 
Triers, Cromwell's Board of, 573, 

574. 
Troyes, Treaty of, 283. 
Trumwiue, Bishop of Whithern, 69. 

his flight, 70. 
Trussel, Sir William, his address to 
Edward the Second ou his dep- 
osition, 229. 
Tunstall, Cuthbert, studies at Pad- 
ua, 321. 
Turgot, his position as an annalist, 
143. 
motives and character of his pol- 
icy, 754. 
Turkey, alliance on behalf of, be- 
tween England, Holland, and 
Prussia, 701. 
saved from France by Conven- 
tion of Cairo, 779. 
revolt of Greeks against, 797. 
Tyler, Wat, effect of his rising on 
Wyclif, 255. 
details of his rising, 200-209. 
Tyndale, his version of the Bible 
suppressed by Henry the 
Eighth, 343; see also Coverdale. 
revives Lollardry, 357. 
translates the Bilile, ib. 
effect of his work, 357, 358, 455, 
456. 
Tyrcounell. Lord, his rule in Ire- 
land, 056, 057. 
his struggle asrainst William the 
Third, 004, 005. 

Ulstf.k, colonization of, its effects. 
572. 



822 



INDEX. 



Universities, rise of, 156 ; see also 

Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, 

Cranmer. 

attitude of, toward William after 

tlie Peasants' Revolt, 2T2. 

United States ; see America, United 

States of. 
Uriconium, the burning of, 51. 
Usher, Archbishop, his scheme of 
Church governraeut, 605. 
moderate Presbyterians willing 
to submit to it, ih. 
Utrecht, peace of, 693, 694. 
the support of it by the Whigs, 

69T. 
its gain to England, 699. 

Vaoaeitjs, his lectures at Oxford, 

15T. 
Van Artevelde, efiect of his death, 

242. 
Vane, Sir Henry, the elder, 568. 
Vane, Sir Harry, the younger, lauds 
in New England, 503. 
leads the Independents, 5'29. 
helps to form the league with 

Scotland, 536, 571. 
his opposition to the Presbyteri- 
ans, 547. 
his reorganization of the navy, 

559. 
urges on the Eeform Bill, 562. 
Cromwell's tauut to, 564. 
offered a seat in the Council of 

State, 565. 
opposes Richard Cromwell, 5S0. 
defeat of his efforts in Richard 

Cromwell's Parliament, ib. 
exempted from the indemnity, 

600. 
his trial and execution, il>. 
Vere, Sir Horace, leader of volun- 
teers, 482. 
Vernej', Sir Edmund, his feelings to 

Charles the First, 52S. 
Vernon, Admiral, 704, 705. 
Vervius, Treaty of, between France 

and Spain, 439. 
Vespucci, Amerigo, his travels, 315. 
Victoria, Queen, accession of, 799. 
Villars, his battles, 684, 6D0. 
Villeinage dies out after Tyler's 
rising, 271, 272; see also JPeas- 
antry. 
Villeneuve, Admiral, his struggle 

with Nelson, 781. 
Virgil, study of his works revived 

in the thirteenth century, 15T. 
Virginia, discovery of, 496, 497. 
its aristocratic character, 727. 
the influence of Washington in, 
740. 
Voltaire, character and efl'ect of his 
work, 759. 

Waoe, poem of, as an authority. 
Walcheren, expedition to, 785. 
Wales, reduction of, by William the 
First, 117. 
share of, in the Barons' War, 181, 

182. 
literature of; see Literature, 
its relations to England, 185-190. 
conquest of, by Edward the First, 
190, 191 ; see Welsh. 
Wallace, William, his career, 211, 

212 
Wallingford, Treaty of, 131. 
Wallington, John, his mother, 458, 

459. 
Wallis, Dr., 596. \ 



Walpole, Sir Robert, his rise, 692, 

693. 
his foreign policy, 694. 
his dislike of reform, 696. 
warns the House against the 

South Sea Bubble, 
his foreign policy, 699, 700. 
his Finance, 700, 701. 
his fall, 705. 

policy in House of Lords, 712. 
his rejection of a plan of taxing 

America, 728. 
suspends Convocation, 706. 
his drunkenness, 707. 
compared with Pitt, 753, 754. 
Walpole, Horace, his admiration 

for Whitfield, 708. 
his account of Pitt's management 

of corruption, 717. 
his account of Pitt's popularity, 

718. 
his account of the victories in 

Canada, 726. 
Walsingham, of St. Albans, history 

of, 306. 
Walsingham, in Elizabeth's reign, 

his opinion of Elizabeth, 379. 
Walter de Map, his romances, 145, 

146. 

Wal vvoVth,William, kills Tyler, 267. 
Ward, Dr., a mathematician, 596. 
Wareham, Danes appear before, SO. 

their repulse from, ib. 
Warham, Archbishop, his life, 318. 
kindness to Erasmus, ib. 
his attitude toward New Learn- 
ing, 321,324. 
his sympathy with Erasmus's 

studies, 324. 
his view of Wolsey's taxes, 335. 
submits Henry's claim to Convo- 
cation, 844. 
dies, .845. 

his view of the monks, 349. 
Warrenne, Earl of Surrey, as Re- 
gent of Scotland, 210. 
his resistance to Edward the 
First, 222. 
Warwick, Earl of, in Edward the 
Second's time, his relations 
with Gaveston, 226, 227. 
Warwick, Earl of (King-maker), 
wins Battle of St. Albans, 297. 
his position and career, 298-300. 
Warwick, Dudley, Earl of; see 

Northumberland, Duke of. 
Warwick, Rich., Earl of, in Charles 
the First's time, buys Connect- 
icut, 503. 
named Admiral of the Fleet, 532. 
Washington, George, his influence 
in Virginia, 740. 
deplores the attack on the tea- 
ships, ib. 
his character and position, 742. 
Watt, his steam-engine, 755. 

its effects, 789. 
Webster contrasted with Ben Jou- 

son, 437. 
Wedraore, Peace of, 80, 81. 
Wellesley, Lord, his devotion to 
Pitt, 754. 
becomes Foreign Secretary, 783. 
Wellington, Duke of, his successes 
in Portugal and Spain, 784r-7SS, 
790, 791 ; see Battles, 
character of his army at Water- 
loo, 793, 794. 
refuses to serve under Canning, 
797. 



Wellington forms a Tory Ministry, 
798. 

accepts Catholic Emancipation, 
ib. 
Welsh, for early history see Britons. 

their conflicts with Northumbria, 
52. 

oppressed by Normans, 111. 
Wentworth, Peter, Elizabeth's 

treatment of, 407, 408. 
Wentworth, Thomas, his first elec- 
tion, 478. 

made sherifl" of a county, 488. 

his declaration on the Petition 
of Right, 491. 

his defense of that Petition, 508. 

his early career, ib. 

his devotion to the court, ib. 

his "Thorough," 509. 

his rule in Ireland, 509,510. 

his suggestions as to methods of 
government in England, 516. 

his opinion of Hampden, 518. 

made Earl of Strafford, 520. 

his return from Ireland, ib. 

his attitude in the Scotch War, 
521. 

the hatred against him, 522. 

his trial £.nd execution, 525, 526. 
Wesley, Charles, his hymns, 708. 
Wesley, John, his early career, 709, 
710. 

his differences from Whitfield, 
709. 

effect of their teaching in pro- 
moting the abolition of slave- 
trade, 758. 
Wessex, first colonization of, 51. 

its reconversion, 60. 

submits to Northumbria, 60. 

rises again under Ini ; see lui. 

its power broken by theDanes,73. 

rises against them, 79. 

reform's in ; .seejElfred. 
Westminster Confession, 546. * 

AVestmorelandjEarl of, rises against 

Elizabeth, 394. 
Weston, a favorite of Buckingham, 
49.S. 

his administration as Treasurer, 
505. 
Westphalia, Peace of, its effects, 

651. 
Wexford, massacre of, 559. 
Wharton, Lord, presents a petition 
for peace with Scotland, 521. 

a member of Whig Junto, 675. 
Whewel],Dr.,his opinion of Roger 

Bacon, 165. 
Whigs, their origin, 638. 

their aims at the Revolution, 663, 
669. 

their power, 674, 675. 

their war policy, 682. 

their clause in the act of union 
with Scotland, 688. 

their impeachment of Sachever- 
ell, 691. 

their triumph under Walpole, 695. 

their submission to their leaders, 
ib. 

their opposition to the younger 
Pitt's scheme of reform, 750. 

defeated by Pitt, 753. 

their opposition to Pitt's finan- 
cial policy, 757. 

their support of Fox at first m 
his approval of French Revolu- 
tion, 763. 

but subsequently leave him, 768 ; 
see also Fox. 



INDEX. 



823 



Whigs join Tories against Bona- 
parte, 780. 
their later reforms, 79S, 799. 
Whitby, its monastery founded by 
Hild, C2. 
Synod of, 64, 65. 
the cowherd of; see Csedmon. 
Whitelocke, states that the arrest 
of the five members, would have 
have been a sad business, 531. 
Whitfield, his preaching, 708. 
Whitgift, his compulsion about the 

Articles, 465. 
Wiclif ; see Wyclif. 
Wiglaf, King of Mercia, 7T. 
Wilberforce, William, sympathy of 
Methodists with him, 711. 
his account of Pitt's feeling when 

defeated in Parliament, 757. 
brings in his Bill against the 

Slave-trade, 758. 
his account of the cause of Pitt's 
death, 782. 
Wilfrith of York, his life, 04. 
his contest with Oolman ; see 
Colmau. 
Wilkes, John, denounced by the 
elder Pitt, 718. 
prosecuted, 734. 

expelled from the House of C'lm- 
mous, and returned to it again, 
737. 
elected alderman of London, 750. 
effect of his career, 738. 
the abuses which made him ad- 
vocate parliamentarv reform, 
756, 757. 
Wilkins.Dr., 596, 597. 
William of Malmesbury, as an au- 
thority, 70, 78, 144. 
William of Newborough, 144. 
William of Jumii'ges, as an author- 
ity, 100, 103. 
William Lougsword, Duke of Nor- 
mandy, 101. 
William of Poitiers, his "Gesta 
Willelmi,"as an authority, 103. 
William the Conqueror, his parent- 
age and struggles with his sub- 
jects, 104. 
his character, 104, 105. 
his struggle with the Augevins, 

106. 
his struggle with France, 105, 106. 
his rule in Normandy, 106. 
he makes Lanfranc his minister, 

ib. 
his visit to England, 107. 
he wins battle of Seiilac, 108, 109. 
his conquest of England, 109-112. 
lays waste the North, 111. 
introduces feudalism, 112. 
his struggle with the baronage, 

118. 
his relations with the Church, 

114, 115. 
his position as a land-owner, 115. 
character of his rule, 116, 117. 



William the Conqueror abolishes 
capital punishment, 117. 
his relations with Scotland and 

Wales, ib. 
his death, ib. 
William Rufus gains the crown, ib. 
his rule, 118. 

his military prowess, 118, 119. 
his death, 119. 
William, son of Henry the First, his 

death, 125. 
William, son of Robert, heir of 

Henry the First, ib. 
William of Champeaus, his lectures, 

153. 
William the Lion of Scotland, his 

relations with England, 207. 
William Lougbeard, 219, 220. 
William of Wykeham, 250, 251. 
William of Orange, the SiIent,Eliza- 
beth's relations with him, 381, 
415. 
William of Orange, afterward Wil- 
liam the Third of England, 
leads the Dutch against Lewis 
the Fourteenth, 623. 
Shaftesbury's intrigues with him, 

628. 
effect of his defeat, 630. 
married to Mary, ib. 
his education, 654. 
his policy, 655, 656. 
his attitude toward James the 

Second, 656, 657. 
invited to England, 657. 
his landing, 659. 
becomes William the Third of 

England, 661. 
his treatment of Scotland, 663, 

664. 
effect of his accession on theory 

ofDivine Right, 006. 
his complaint of his treatment by 

Parliament, ib. 
his conquest of Ireland, G70, 671 . 
changes introduced into the form 
of government by his accession; 
see Sunderland Cabinet, 
his foreign policy, 677, 678. 
betrayed by Lewis, 678, 680. 
his illness and death, 679, 682. * 
William the Fourth, his accession, 
798. 
favors reform of Parliament, ib. 
V/illiaras, Roger, expelled from 

Massachusetts, 503. 
Williams, Bishop, his scheme of 
Church reform, 529. 
his protest, 530. 
Willis, Dr., investigates the brain, 

597. 
Winchelsey, Archbishop, opposes 

Edward the First, 225. 
Windebank, his flight from En- 
gland, 524. 
Winfrith ; see Boniface. 
Winthrop, John, in New England, 
498, 503. 



Winthrop, John, his opinion of the 

Long Parliament, 523. 
Witenageniote, its origin, 66. 
Wither, George, his satii'es, 514. 
Wolfe, General, 725. 
Wolsey, Thomas, his foreign poli- 
cy, 322. 
his rise into power, 832, 333. 
his home policy, 333. 
bis relations with Parliament, 

335, 336. 
his attitude about the King's di- 
vorce, 337, 338. 
his fall, 389, 340. 

his use of the King's Council, 
505, 506. 
Woodward founds the science of 

mineralogy, 597. 
Worcester, Earl of, 310. 
Worcester, battle of; see Battles. 
Wrangholm, birthplace of Cuth- 

bert, 61. 
Wulfere, son of Penda, 60. 

his rule, 66, 67. 
Wulstan sent out to Esthonia by 

Alfred, S3. 
Wulstan, Bishop of Worcester, de- 
feats rebels, 117. 
Wycherley, his dramas, 588. 
Wyclif, his writings brought to 
Prague, 160. 
his early life, obscurity of, 251. 
his relation with Oxford and the 

school-men, 251, 252. 
his attack on the Papacy, 2.^2. 
his alliance with John of Gaunt, 

254, 255. 
effect on his work of Tyler's 

rising, 255. 
his attack on Transubstantia- 

tion, 256. 
his writings generally, 256, 257. 
his followers, 257, 258. 
his death, 2.59. 
Wyndham, William, refuses to take 

office without Fox, 781. 
Wyuter, Admiral, his attack on 
Scotland, 386. 

York, in the time of theRomans, 42. 
capital of Roman Britain, 52. 
William the Conqueror leads his 
army to, 111. 
York, Richard, Duke of, rebels 
against Henry the Sixth, 295, 
296. 
convenes Parliament, 297. 
his death, ib. 
York, James, Duke of, suspected by 
the House of Commons, 623. 
resigns his admiralship, 624. 
returns in triumph after the de- 
feat of the Exclusion Bill, 640 ; 
see also Exclusion Bill, Shaftes- 
bury, Earl of, James the Sec- 
ond. 
Young, Arthur, effect of his work 
on agriculture, 755. 



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